wtf: Yes, there is a strong likelihood that MathJax will be added in the next day or so. Just need to get about an hour free after work to make the change. While I can post at work, I can't access the server through the firewall.
Peter, I will explain, because I like explaining, and explaining it helps me wrap my head around it. And I think it's not as hard to understand as it first seems:
When you visit ILP, your computer sends a request to our server for a specific file. Take a look at the URL for this page:
"http://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=192817"
That's sending a request to
ilovephilosophy.com for the file
viewtopic.php. viewtopic.php is a text file containing instructions for ILP's server. The part of the URL after the
? provides additional information that ILP's server will use when following the instructions. The forum you know as 'Meta', the server knows as forum number 7, thus,
f=7. Similarly, the server knows the topic as number 192817, so
t=192817*.
ILP's server uses that information, follows the instructions in viewtopic.php, to create a file with instructions for your computer to follow in order to display the page, things like "put the picture
ilplogorevised.png at the top in the middle". Your computer follows those instructions, and presents the page that you see.
The instructions that your computer receives can tell it to get information from other servers. That's part of how Google and Facebook can track you around the web: your own computer blindly follows the instructions it receives and passes information to Google and Facebook. But it also allows a page at ILP to have e.g. a Youtube video embedded in it.
Another kind of file that your computer can get is Javascript files. They will tell your computer to get additional files from a site, and run some more complex instructions. Javascript powers a lot of the modern web, because HTML doesn't allow for very fancy instructions. And since Javascript instructions are running on your computer instead of on the server, they can make pages that are 'responsive', i.e. that use your actions to determine what you see.
MathJax is just one of those Javascript instruction sets. As I understand it, when your computer runs the MathJax instructions, it looks at the file you received from ILP for specific strings of characters, e.g. "$$" (I'm not sure if that's the right character combination, but it's something like that). When it finds the right string, it looks at the subsequent text, passes it through another set of instructions, and returns math syntax instead of text. That lets you type things like 'squrt{}' and get a square root sign. Effectively, MathJax allows users to add instructions to their posts that tell your computer, "insert a graphical square root sign here".
So what
wtf is asking for is for me to add a short instruction to the file that ILP returns to users that says, "also get the MathJax Javascript file and follow its instructions". And he wants to know when I'll add it, because if it's not there his posts will look stupid being full of computer instructions that your computer doesn't follow.
*
In fact, the forum number isn't necessary. If you delete "f=7&" from the URL, it will still return this page. I'm not sure why it uses both the forum and the topic number, but it does. Possibly a legacy of an earlier database structure? Or just to be extra-super unambiguous in case a topic number got reused?
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