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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1480 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 14, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Edit: Sadly while the post rendered correctly in the preview, it looks like some of the tags do get stripped when they get published in final form. I guess because arbitrary xml has some theoretical vulnerabilities. I guess we'll have to live without math support for a while longer.

The Motte has (limited) math support!

Inspired by the recent discussion of innumeracy, controversies caused by the refusal to specify problems symbolically, as well as past lamentations about the lack of math support I endeavored to research the simplest way to add MathJax to the codebase for limited TeX support. During my journey I discover that W3C has apparently been working on web native math in the form of MathML since 1998. It has varying implementation completeness for its 2½ components. There is semantic MathML, Presentation MathML, and MathML Core. The good news is The Motte appears to freely pass along the raw MathML XML tags, the bad news is implementation appears to then depend on the users browser. Fortunately, it seems like at least Core is implemented in most modern browsers. I have tested the latest Firefox for Windows and Android, as well as Chrome for Windows and Android.

The raw code is a bit of a mess. To render:

x=−b±b2−4ac2a

The LaTeX:

x=\frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^{2}-4ac}}{2a}

becomes:

<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mrow><mi>x</mi><mo>=</mo><mfrac><mrow><mo>−</mo><mi>b</mi><mo>±</mo><msqrt><mrow><msup><mi>b</mi><mn>2</mn></msup><mo>−</mo><mn>4</mn><mi>a</mi><mi>c</mi></mrow></msqrt></mrow><mrow><mn>2</mn><mi>a</mi></mrow></mfrac></mrow></math>

Fortunately there is a relatively easy workaround. There are a number of applications that support translation, including online. Allowing you to construct decently complex equations. e.g.:

L=∫0∞Bν(T)cos(θ)dν=2π515k4T4c2h3cos(θ)π=σT4cos(θ)π

The rendering is still not perfect, but much better than plain text.

@ZorbaTHut thanks for all the hard work you do keeping the site running. DM me and I'll send you a patch if you want a note for the 'Formatting help' page, and that's somehow easier than just adding it the next time you're working on the code base.

Oh man, I don't know if this is a promise or a threat, but if we got even basic LaTeX support, I can imagine writing so many more math posts here. Hopefully more Friday Fun than Culture War.

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