Re: [Axiom-developer] axiom opportunity

[Bob McElrath]

Page, Bill address@hidden wrote:
> Could you point me to some examples of these benchmarks?
> Identical pages rendered as MathML and jsMath? Are there
> some cases that are especially bad? Worse case?

I've never written down any numbers because jsMath pages take many
seconds, while MathML is always unnoticably fast.

Attached is one of my test pages, to be compared with:
    http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/examples/TeXbook16.html

> I have not done any rigorous tests but my experiments using
> FireFox 1.5.0.2 on Windows makes me feel jsMath has the lead -
> although both seem likely "fast enough" for the kinds of uses
> I have in mind, e.g. rendering a single "page" of HTML online -
> either from a web site or from a local copy of Axiom. Such a
> "page" might contain say at most 10 equations and maybe 20
> embedded symbols.

I find this statement very difficult to believe.  On the above example
page I can watch it render each expression.  It takes ~4s to render the
whole page.  The MathML version (attached) has the Firefox cursor in the
"busy" state for ~0.5s.  I think most of that time is spent loading the
file and parsing it.  It's about 0.5s for much much larger pages too.

jsMath is at least an order of magnatude slower.  I don't understand how
you haven't noticed this...  On my TiddlyWiki I have many wiki nodes
that take several seconds just to render the math...

I ran a profiler on jsMath a while back in an attempt to speed it up.
It's performance is fundamentally related to the function BBoxFor which
has to get the browser to render an expression so it can be measured.
This function is extremely expensive at ~0.1s per invocation.

> > In the long term the solution to math on the web is MathML.
> 
> In spite of all the effort, I remain sceptical.

Why?

> Anyway what prevents jsMath also from benefiting from these
> new fonts?

jsMath benefits too.

> > Axiom should jump on this opportunity.
> 
> On the contrary, I think Axiom should continue to make use of
> the most expedient solution available now. Axiom needs a better
> user interface now. I think a possibly (much?) better interface
> in the future (even the relatively near future, say 2 years) is
> likely to be too late.

A better user interface needs a fast, standardized way to render math.
MathML is that solution.

Rendering images or jsMath will never allow:
    1) subexpression interactivity
    2) cut and paste
    3) graphical equation editing
which one wangs for a UI.

--
Cheers,
Bob McElrath [Univ. of California at Davis, Department of Physics]

    "It is almost universally felt that when we call a country
    democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every
    kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they
    might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one
    meaning." -- George Orwell

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