Talk:Josephus problem: Difference between revisions

Under-tested cosmetic edits made to the task page at 17:36, 21 April 2016, including the injection of spaces around expressions in <math> tags, have left some task description formulae completely invisible to all browsers which display the graphic file version of formulae rather than processing the MathML (this is, in fact, the majority of browsers). The MediaWiki processor does not currently expect such spaces, and generates syntactically ill-formed HTML if they are introduced. Other aspects of these cosmetic edits may further compound the problem. [[User:Hout|Hout]] ([[User talk:Hout|talk]]) 20:06, 22 September 2016 (UTC)

: seconded- It's a severe nuisance! I removed one math beautification and can clearly see "k=3" :-)[[User:Walterpachl|Walterpachl]]

:: FWIW it may not always be necessary to entirely remove the '''<math>''' tag. In most cases you can restore visibility by just removing the two redundant spaces – one at the start and one at the end of the <math> contents, which began to be injected when the cosmetics campaign first kicked off about 6 months ago. In this case for example, '''<big><math> k=3 </math></big>''' causes invisibility on most browsers, but '''<big><math>k=3</math></big>''' (redundant flanking space removed) returns the contents to visibility.

:: The editor who has been introducing these spaces for six months, unaware that they were causing formulae to vanish from most browsers, explained that he found <math> tags easier to read when these spaces were added. Removing them again is enough to fix about 80% of the cases. The remaining cases seem to need a deeper 'undo' of the well intentioned but under-tested and accidentally destructive cosmetic edit. [[User:Hout|Hout]] ([[User talk:Hout|talk]]) 08:14, 23 September 2016 (UTC)