Math on the Web

It is reasonable to expect that in the year 2015, the predominant way of doing math will no longer be by pen and paper, but in an integrated web-based math-development system that supports the mathematician in all aspects of mathematics. (MathWeb.org)

Publishing Math on the Web

This page compares three web-versions of this article Eulerian polynomials (pdf). They all should look like more or less the same in your browser (see the links below). The difference is in their representation as web pages.

I recommend to install good math fonts before proceeding.

The STIX fonts, and
MathJax, a display engine for LaTeX and MathML.

After installation the items in the following list should all display in your browser. For writers new to TeX this Wikipedia cheat sheet is helpful.

Basically you have three options when implementing a mathematical page on the web: to use equations images, to use a script based display engine like MathJax or to code in MathML, a XML dialect. However, MathML is a low-level specification designed for describing mathematics for machine to machine communication and equation images do not scale with the surrounding text. Thus MathJax seems to be the most attractive way to go. The three implementations of the article illustrate these three approaches.

tech:	Images	MathJax	MathML
file type:	html	html	xhtml
script:	no	yes	no
text font:	Cambria	Cambria	Cambria
math font:	--	MathJaxFont	StixGeneral
test page:	click	click	click
Safari	good	very good	not supported
Explorer	good	good	needs plugin
Firefox	good	good	very good
Opera	good	mediocre	readable
Chrome	good	good	not supported

Tests were performed on a Windows XP system using the current browsers (2010-08-08), in the case of Firefox it was 4.0 (Beta3). (Here is an experimental version using Html5; it requires Firefox 4.)

Recommendations (relative to our limited test setup):

Use Safari with MathJax and the Cambria font for the text if you want the best and most pleasing results.
Use Firefox 4 with MathML and the STIX fonts otherwise. You will need a good engine to transform TeX to MathML (some TeX editors will provide this feature).
The Explorer blends images and the Trebuchet font quite well. However, using images is only a poor substitute for the other two options.

Safari with MathJax (Cambria)	Opera with MathML (Trebuchet)

Firefox 3 with MathML (Trebuchet)	Firefox 4 with MathJax (Cambria)

Here three other test pages using the MathJax-setup.

Make MathJax colorful.
Is the Gamma function mis-defined? Hadamard versus Euler — Who found the better Gamma function?
Generalized binomial coefficients.

Acknowledgment: I would like to thank Davide P. Cervone for pointing out a bug and a misconfiguration in my initial setup.