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dw_suggestions2012-12-09 09:43 am
Support MathJax in Entries
Title:
Support MathJax in Entries
Area:
MathJax JavaScript support at site level
Summary:
I suggest that (in due time!) dw support MathJax <a href="http://www.mathjax.org/">MathJax</a> for mathematical/technical formatting in dw entries.
Description:
This suggestion is intended to make it easy for dw people to write beautiful and useful mathematical/technical content in our entries. MathJax is now a mature and well-supported FOSS extension of html via javascript, with healthy user and developer communities. We've been experimenting with MathJax for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and we've been very pleased with it so far. (This is not an official SEP endorsement.) Code can be written or displayed rendered or in TeX or MathML. This makes it useful also for gacking and modifying, and even for learning more about those markup languages. Anyone who has tried to do serious mathematical or technical typesetting in html will agree, I think, that html is *not* a typesetting language. MathJax goes a long way toward allowing decent technical typesetting in an html context.
If MathJax can be permitted as a tightly controlled JavaScript layer at the dw site level, which I think it can, then users will be able to write mathematical and technical fragments into their journal entries as easily as any other html. I don't envision putting MathJax support into the rich text editor -- I anticipate that anyone who wants to use MathJax will be comfortable editing their own markup. This is rather an extension of html markup into a wider domain.
It is possible that I'm overestimating the ease of implementing this suggestion, but I've experimented with MathJax support in my personal webpages and at the SEP site, and it looks as though MathJax makes this as easy as possible. Furthermore, the social/political aspects look promising, insofar as the MathJax user and developer communities look like just the sorts of folks dw wants to make alliance with, as far as I can tell.
This suggestion:
Should be implemented as-is.
15 (31.9%)
Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (2.1%)
Shouldn't be implemented.
3 (6.4%)
(I have no opinion)
26 (55.3%)
(Other: please comment)
2 (4.3%)
no subject
1. Will MathJax work without JS? I can't answer authoratatively, but it seems unlikely given that the big headline text on www.mathjax.org is "MathJax is an open source JavaScript display engine for mathematics that works in all modern browsers".
2. This page on accessibility is worth a skim. http://www.mathjax.org/resources/articles-and-presentations/accessible-pages-with-mathjax/
3. As is this one on browser compatibility: http://www.mathjax.org/resources/browser-compatibility/
Wondering about other ways to implement maths support, some other means of editing MathML might be useful in the future, but it appears that browser support for MathML is not sufficiently widespread yet. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML#Web_browsers.
So it looks as though MathJax is still about the only widely-accessible cross-browser way of doing this, but it probably requires JS.
no subject
no subject
Accessibility for mathematical text and other text containing special symbols would seem to be a difficult problem for any implementation method -- think of how many ways there are of reading logic, mathematics, computer science, and technical matter generally aloud. But I know much less about accessibility than I would like to. I hope the experts among us regarding accessibility will weigh in on this aspect of the proposal.
no subject