Bug 24207 requests switching the math rendering preference default from its
current setting (which usually produces a nice PNG and occasionally produces
some kinda ugly HTML) to the "always render PNG" setting.

I'd actually propose dropping the rendering options entirely...

* "HTML if simple" and "if possible" produce *horrible* ugly output that
nobody likes, so people use hacks to force PNG rendering. Why not just
render to PNG?
* "MathML" mode is even *MORE* limited than "HTML if simple", making it
entirely useless.
* nobody even knows what "Recommended for modern browsers" means, but it
seems to be somewhere in that "occasionally crappy HTML, usually PNG"
continuum.

So we're left with only two sane choices:

* Always render PNG
* Leave it as TeX (for text browsers)

Text browsers will show the alt text on the images, which is... the TeX
code. So even this isn't actually needed for its stated purpose. (Hi
Jidanni! :) lynx should show the tex source when using the PNG mode.)

It's conceivable that a few folks really honestly prefer to see the latex
source in their graphical browsers (should at least do a quick stat check to
see if anybody uses it on purpose), but I wouldn't mind removing that
either.


Fancier rendering like MathJax etc should be considered as a separate thing
(and implemented a bit differently to avoid parser cache fragmentation!), so
don't let future mode concerns worry y'all. Any thoughts on whether this
makes sense to do for 1.18 or 1.19?

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24207#c9

-- brion
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