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Mathjax

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Re: Mathjax

#31

Post by blasdel »

WesleyJohnson wrote: post #21
zackattack wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AJAX is not about XML anymore. A lot of people use XHRs with JSON. AJAX now refers to the dynamic phenomenon. So their name is indeed appropriate. Evolution.

Isn't that kind of like SAT no longer standing for anything and it just being the name of the test now? Or, was that movie just making that up?

No, it's more like if the SAT was partially named for the type of soil underlying the foundation of the building occupied by the school where the tests were first given, and then had its hype cycle fueled by shittily-paraphrased press releases from garden supply distributors.

It's Pataphor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Pataphysics#Pataphor

Re: Mathjax

#32

Post by andreyf »

blasdel wrote: post #29
andreyf wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They never had anything to do with one another Not completely true... The X in XHR stands for XML, as that's what it parses natively [1], whereas parsing JSON wasn't native until relatively recently. JavaScript had Java's syntax. Not sure about hamsters and ham... 1. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms534370(VS.85).aspx

From your link: " responseXML was introduced in Windows Internet Explorer 7 " - in October 2006. XHR was first shipped with Internet Explorer 5 - in March 1999! JavaScript's syntax is less like Java's than any other popular language that idiomatically uses curly-braces to delimit blocks. Hamster starts with Ham, but they are as unrelated as two things can be that exist in the same broad category (flesh).

Yeah... giving them the benefit of the doubt, that's misleading wording: XMLHttpRequest is an object in the JS namespace as of IE7. Before that, you needed to import an ActiveX Object, which has supported requestXML since MSXML 2.0 (that's IE5). See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms757066(VS.85).aspx

Re: Mathjax

#34

Post by PaulTopping »

hyperbovine wrote: post #13
christopherolah wrote: post #2

This came up on the sage (FOSS alternative to Mathematica and freinds) mailing lists and I thought I'd post it here. It always surprises me how difficult math on the Internet has turned out to be. Hopefully this can help...

MathML was supposed to be the answer, and we all know how that went. Just goes to show how over the top people were going with XML in the late 1990s. I mean, x = − b ± b 2 − 4 ⁢ a ⁢ c 2 ⁢ a to typeset the fucking quadratic formula?

MathML is not a human input language! MathML is a representation. While comparisons with TeX and LaTeX are inevitable, they serve different purposes. Look at the HTML/CSS used to render a dynamic menu sometime. I'm sure it is pretty ugly too.

Re: Mathjax

#35

Post by PaulTopping »

mhartl wrote: post #22

Yeah, so this is basically awesome. I've written a LaTeX-based markup language that I'm using for my Ruby on Rails Tutorial book ( http://www.railstutorial.org/book ), but it's really designed for putting math & physics books on the web as HTML while still making nice PDFs. One big challenge I've faced is making nice HTML math typesetting, which I solved using texvc (the secret of Wikipedia's math typesetting), but u…

MathML allows math to be rendered to speech for people with disabilities, something that LaTeX won't do. It is also a much more solid REPRESENTATION. It is not an input language like LaTeX. Think of LaTeX as YOUR favorite math UI, whereas MathML is an underlying representation. The fact that you can View Source and read it is immaterial.
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