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Adding support for math notation

I believe the MathJax should also work in Stack Overflow, not only in stats, math... SE sites. It is suitable in many questions and answers. It would make such posts much more readable.

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    @Kevin Montrose Is it not OK to re-request a feature-request that is over 2 years old? What is the proper technique for trying to persuade you guys to change your mind on something?
    – Michael McGowan
    Sep 15, 2011 at 20:54
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    @Michael, thank you for your effort. In these situations, not very rare unfortunatelly, the SO/SE community seems pretty rigid. Stop discussion. Duplicate, not a real question, not constructive. Dot.
    – Tomas
    Sep 15, 2011 at 21:03
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    @Michael - the same objection still applies. MathJax is really really heavy (and getting heavier, this has come up on Math.SE), and not commonly needed enough to include. I figured closing as duplicate was better than copy/pasting Jeff's old answer.
    – Kevin Montrose
    Sep 15, 2011 at 21:09
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    @Kevin There has been some discussion here by Tomas that perhaps it could somehow be done on demand. I don't know whether that is feasible, but that point did not seem to be addressed in the referenced post. However, I don't think adding that in a 2-year old "status-declined" post is likely to advance the discussion at all (whereas it might have a fighting chance in a fresh question).
    – Michael McGowan
    Sep 15, 2011 at 21:15
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    One answer in this question would also be eligible for MathJax: stackoverflow.com/questions/7843048/…
    – Tomas
    Oct 21, 2011 at 13:12
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    I completely agree! I would like to put a bounty here to draw attention so that users may decide if they share this or not.
    – Revious
    Oct 2, 2014 at 14:48
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    don't remove auto-notices unless you can reopen the question, or question was reopened.
    – nicael
    Oct 2, 2014 at 14:52
  • @KevinMontrose: is it possible to go deeper in the question? What do you mean by "MathJax is really really heavy"? Wouldn't be possible to download it only if used in the page by the user? In a dynamic page this would take some fraction of second to include the js code dynamically. At lest it should be added to section like this one: datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/1059/…
    – Revious
    Oct 2, 2014 at 14:52
  • @nicael: thanks for explaining, sorry I didn't know..
    – Revious
    Oct 2, 2014 at 14:55
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    I just used MathJax on SO assuming it would work, and was frustrated when it didn't. I was talking about very mathy stuff, so it would've been appropriate. Though I agree, it wouldn't be for 95-99% of questions and answers.
    – Omnifarious
    Aug 10, 2018 at 2:20
  • Html supports some math notations. w3.org/MarkUp/html3/maths.html
    – Nick H.
    Nov 3, 2022 at 7:47

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Speaking as someone who is both a mathematician and a software developer, I agree that this would be beneficial. However, Jeff Atwood disagrees that the benefit is worth the heavy burden this markup places upon the system. While I do think it would be nice, I'm not in a position to know what the burden would be relative to the benefit.

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  • thanks for response... I understand that mathjax could be very demanding having much expressions on the page, but, is mathjax really so demanding when you use it only here and there?
    – Tomas
    Sep 15, 2011 at 14:43
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    Tomas, I would not think it is so demanding and I struggle to see what the big deal is, but you would have to take that up with Jeff.
    – Michael McGowan
    Sep 15, 2011 at 14:59
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    @Tomas, the thing is, MathJax is a javascript library, you can't choose which pages it gets loaded on, so if you want it to be able to work everywhere, it has to get loaded everywhere. Given that the dev team are completely obsessed with shaving off the tiniest millisecond on every page served, statistically speaking there's near-zero justification for including MathJax support. We're talking 2000000+ questions (and rising). What percentage of those require MathJax?
    – Benjol
    Sep 15, 2011 at 17:56
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    @Benjol, the mathjax library could be loaded only for questions where it is used in. And loading it for editing wouldn't be such a problem I think, moreover you cound use on-demand loading then (either implicit or explicit - e.g. by user switching it on).
    – Tomas
    Sep 15, 2011 at 18:10
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    @Tomas, when do you decide (and how) that it is 'used'? Auto-detecting and user switching it on both feel a bit kludgy to me, especially, as I said, given the very low percentage of questions where it applies...
    – Benjol
    Sep 15, 2011 at 20:03
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    @Benjol, when do you decide (and how) that it is 'used'? I think it is quite simple to see if MathJax is used in particular question or not. As for the editting, script autoload upon writing first MathJax sequence would be appropriate I think (you normally wait for MathJax expressions to render anyway).
    – Tomas
    Sep 15, 2011 at 20:43
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    Every other technical stack-exchange cite supports MathJax, and these sites seem to operate ok. Many complicated technical programming concepts cannot be expressed clearly without it. If the community is averse to using the library, add a user-controlled check-box for "this post contains mathjax". can be added. This flag can trigger dynamic loading of the library.
    – MRule
    Dec 2, 2021 at 17:35

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