So I was trying out some stuff in Sakai, pretending to write an assessment (quiz, to the uninitiated) with complicated equations. I ran into a few problems like you can't do fractions, there is no square root symbol, no multiplication symbol, etc. Perhaps I will write a full review once I figure out if these limitations are real, or if I'm just missing something.
Anyway, I remember seeing complicated equations on Wikipedia, so I decided to investigate how they do it. It looks like the equations on there were generated by LaTeX, but they are just ugly png files with a lot of jaggies. I was thinking it would have been cool if they had used SVG. But, they had some info on possible future direction, which led me to the MathML entry, which is supposedly going to be implemented in next gen web browsers.
One of the more annoying aspects of what you can do with Sakai (and Microsoft's Equation Editor I might add) is that you have to do tons of highlighting and clicking to format things. Like, if I want a chemical equation like HC2H3O2, it requires highlighting 3 things and clicking 3 buttons. That back and forth of the mouse gets quite frustrating. In LaTeX, things are much simpler. You would just write:
HC_2H_3O_2
and you would be done. MathML, on the other hand, is a terribly verbose XML format (check out the quadratic equation example in the Wikipedia entry), so it's not much better than the point and click method. I realize that LaTeX is a little intimidating to write by hand, and a program could easily generate either LaTeX or MathML, but I have yet to see a program that is as efficient at building equations as hand-coding LaTeX markup is. With that in mind, I think allowing a subset of LaTeX is probably the best way to allow people to enter equations. There is some interesting work out there, like this JavaScript library. It would be cool to see something like that integrated into one of Sakai's rich text editors.
