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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

  • 1995 - 2010: By far and large, images were used for math display on the web, even though there were newer technologies and possibly better ways available to do math typesetting on the web.

  • 2010 - 2014: MathML and jsMath emerge as two viable solutions for displaying browser-side typeset math on the web. A few adventurous site authors start using these newer solutions, but the biggest operators still stick to image display. A variety of tools emerge for generating or authoring MathML, all with their early limitations, but none of them become sufficiently popular to reach critical mass and speed up in development.

  • 2014 - 2018: Even the big sites have since switched over to either MathML or a solution like MathJax. Kahn Academy creates yet more math on the web solution called KaTeX and SsKaTeX, both of which prove to become quite popular, unlike the older MathML tools.

In any case, what most of this otherwise redundant implementation progress has done is successfully affirm one unchanging standard in math typesetting: Donald Knuth’s TeX system, responsible for the core typesetting algorithms, and the derived LaTeX system, mainly a syntactic convenience library.