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posted by Fnord666 on Monday April 10 2017, @05:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the another-one-bites-the-dust dept.

The MathJax CDN hosted at cdn.mathjax.org will be shutting down on April 30, 2017.

Background

Our CDN has been an important part of MathJax's history. When MathJax made its first public release in 2010, hosting a library like MathJax was a complex challenge. The CDN launched a year later and helped resolve this difficulty, enabling MathJax to quickly become the gold standard for rendering mathematics on the web.

Over the past 6 years, the CDN has grown steadily each year. From 22 Million monthly users and 1.3TB traffic in late 2011 to 179 Million monthly users and 70TB traffic last month. We switched CDN providers several times to improve performance and reduce costs. In the last three years we could keep up with this growth thanks to support from Google (providing free storage on Google Cloud Storage) which we combined with CloudFlare.

Recently, CloudFlare informed us that we need to upgrade our CloudFlare plan at a significantly increased rate. We greatly appreciate how CloudFlare has worked with us to find a suitable solution. Unfortunately, we do not see an affordable way to keep the CDN.

The MathJax Consortium and its team have come to the decision that our resources are best spent by focusing them on development and so we will retire our self-hosted CDN service on April 30, 2017.

We are proud of what the MathJax CDN has accomplished for mathematics on the web and we are grateful for everyone who has made use of it. We hope we can help everyone migrate to a new setup quickly and efficiently over the coming weeks.

They anticipate there will be no loss to the community and outline several alternatives.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by fnj on Monday April 10 2017, @08:15PM (2 children)

    by fnj (1654) on Monday April 10 2017, @08:15PM (#491914)

    MathML is a SPEC whose support level is up to the client system. MathJax is a SCRIPT LIBRARY. And BTW, MathJax supports MathML, as well as the more professional LaTeX-based markup.

    MathML support was abandoned by Chrome (nobody was using it), which puts it right out of the running if you care about your site's usability. Other browsers such as Konqueror also lack support. The quality of MathML rendering depends on the particular fonts which are installed on the CLIENT system.

    MathJax is supported by virtually all browsers, all the way back to incredibly old versions such as IE6, Chrome 0.3, Safari 2.0, etc - basically anything that does JavaScript. The rendering uses web-based fonts, so it does not rely on ideosyncracies of the client system. MathJax can be configured to use SVG graphics in place of fonts, for the highest-quality rendering, which will appear absolutely identical and authentic in ANY browser which supports SVG. And, if you absolutely must, you can configure MathJax to use the client browser's MathML rendering.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2017, @09:37PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2017, @09:37PM (#491947)

    And, if you care the slightest bit about performance, you can configure MathJax to use the client browser's MathML rendering.

    FTFY

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by hendrikboom on Monday April 10 2017, @11:06PM

      by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 10 2017, @11:06PM (#491999) Homepage Journal

      Indeed, large pages with a lots of mathjax crashed the browser. My guess is that it was a problem with available main memory, because parts of the complete file worked, albeit very slowly (minutes of longer to render the page).

      I switched to using mathml, because that worked well, at least on firefox.

      If more browsers supported mathml, perhaps mathematicians wouldn't have to resort to using pdfs everywhere, which refuse to fit the reader's available screen size.