Now this is impressive

Nth in a series of breathless posts about Wikipedia:

I don't know whether Wikipedia will survive long-term as a repository of human knowledge, but anything that automatically parses TeX markup for mathematics can't be all bad. This explains why there are so many equation-covered pages in the physics section; many people in the business have TeX down so cold that they can type and read equation markup in an almost conversational mode. I'm rusty, but there was a time when I was pretty close to that (though switching between TeX and Mathematica could be jarring).

Several years ago, this fact created confusion on the sci.physics newsgroups on Usenet. Physicists and physics students there made such heavy use of informal pidgin-TeX to convey mathematical formulae that many non-physicist readers became convinced that there existed special newsreaders unknown to them that were capable of rendering the equation markup inline. It was almost impossible to convince them that this crazy-looking markup was actually being parsed directly in people's heads.

(To answer my first question: the ALT text for Wikipedia's generated images is the TeX source. I think you could do better than that, but it wouldn't be so easy. The question of accessibility for the blind and visually impaired on math-heavy Web pages is something I've struggled with for a long time. In theory, MathML markup plus easily available intelligent renderers would solve the problem, but that in theory part is quite a qualifier.)

On the fritz

Very strange: my previous post keeps appearing and disappearing. Let's see if this improves matters.