MathJax: Beautiful and accessible math in all browsers
I'm curious - is there any mathjax/mathml/latex/whatever equivalent to Markdown?<p>Because every math extension seems to fail the one great feature of markdown: that when I view Markdown as plain text, it's still really legible and the amount of noise added by the markup is minimal, especially if you use the "underline with hyphens" syntax for headings.<p>Like, every time I see backslashes they're just distracting if I'm trying to read it raw.<p>Like is there any math format where the Quadratic Formula is just<p><pre><code>         -b ± √(b² - 4ac)
    x =  ----------------
                2a
</code></pre>
Obviously I'd expect something like this to be the output after running the text file through a formatter, just like how in Markdown it's common to reformat things as you go because they're hard to type manually.<p>Like with Markdown Tables.<p>Tables are <i>extremely</i> difficult to type in MD, and should never be done manually, right?<p>Basically, here's how you do tables in markdown:<p>First, you do them the <i>wrong</i> way, half-assed.<p><pre><code>    | Header1 |Header2 |Header3 |
    |-|-|-|
    | BodyRow1 Cell1 | Cell2 |Cell3|
    | BodyRow2 Cell1 | Foo |Bar|
</code></pre>
which looks like crap, right?<p>then you run them through a formatter and you get<p><pre><code>    | Header1        | Header2 | Header3 |
    | -------------- | ------- | ------- |
    | BodyRow1 Cell1 | Cell2   | Cell3   |
    | BodyRow2 Cell1 | Foo     | Bar     |
</code></pre>
which looks nice, right?<p>And then it becomes a real table when you convert your Markdown into Html/Pdf/Docx/whatever.<p>That's what I was wondering if there's anything similar for <i>math</i>.<p>Like, the way I'd type the Quadratic Formula would be<p><pre><code>    x = -b +- sqrt(-b-4ac)) over 2a
</code></pre>
but when I run it through the code formatter, I'd expect to get cleaned up the same way my table did.<p><pre><code>         -b ± √̅(b² - 4ac)
    x =  ————————————————
               2a</code></pre>