[racket] Literate Programming and Scribble

On 9/9/2010 8:31 PM, Eli Barzilay wrote:

> MathJax is the best solution I've seen so far -- but it's kind of
> cheating...  "If we can't get broad support for renering math, we'll
> do it ourselves."  This makes the result much less appealing as proper
> support -- like relying on js (probably means that things break left
> an right if I want to view local file:// html pages), or like
> requiring me to upgrade a js library when they have a new version (or
> maybe I can use code from their site, but then I rely on their server
> to have my documents in working shape).
>

I suppose we have to ``cheat'' now. All major browsers claim they will 
prioritize support for HTML 5, but the quality of Math rendering is 
totally different. You need to worry about complicated issues like 
supporting user input and handling baselines and ``stretchy'' operators 
correctly. For example, Firefox 3.6 correctly stretches integral signs 
in displayed equations but not general ``big'' operators, which violates 
the W3C standard. If browsers are really serious about non-toy math 
support, they need to hire someone with expertise in complex typesetting 
algorithms. Solving most of these problems correctly would involve 
low-level changes to a browser's rendering engine, which are unlikely to 
happen given priorities in browser implementation.