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I implemented a TeX engine in WebAssembly so you really can run TeX in the browser. You can see a demo of this at https://tex.rossprogram.org/ and at https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js you can find a Pascal compiler that targets WebAssembly which can compile Knuth's TeX. Interesting primitives like \directjs are also implemented, so you can execute javascript from inside TeX. The rendering is handled with https://github.com/kisonecat/dvi2html for which I finally fixed some font problems.
To make it relatively fast, the TeX engine gets snapshotted and shipped to the browser with much of TeXlive already loaded. So even things like TikZ work reasonably well. There is of course a lot more to do! The plan is to convert ximera.osu.edu to this new backend by the fall.
I implemented a TeX engine in WebAssembly so you really can run TeX in the browser. You can see a demo of this at https://tex.rossprogram.org/ and at https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js you can find a Pascal compiler that targets WebAssembly which can compile Knuth's TeX. Interesting primitives like \directjs are also implemented, so you can execute javascript from inside TeX. The rendering is handled with https://github.com/kisonecat/dvi2html for which I finally fixed some font problems.
To make it relatively fast, the TeX engine gets snapshotted and shipped to the browser with much of TeXlive already loaded. So even things like TikZ work reasonably well. There is of course a lot more to do! The plan is to convert ximera.osu.edu to this new backend by the fall.
I apologize if this is pedantic but you can absolutely "render" KaTeX on the server-side: https://github.com/jdan/thatjdanisso.cool/blob/902f1c421b02b...
MathJax does not support this because, IIRC, it runs layout calculations in the browser whereas KaTeX passes it off to CSS.
If your argument is then that layout calculations should _also_ happen on the server then... I'm not sold and that would be a critique of web browsers and not math rendering.
The "server-side rendering" aspect of KaTeX is (and always has been, as far as I'm aware) front-and-centre on their landing page [1]. It allows you to input LaTeX and output HTML ready for inclusion server-side - the only thing this HTML needs to support it is the KaTeX CSS. This is very easy to do if your web server or static site generator is running on Node, and only a bit more difficult if it's running on something else (and therefore needs to shell out to Node). So if the author wants a good solution to server-side rendering, just look a little more at KaTeX.
On the flip side, I have reverted some of my server-side rendering of mathematics back to client-side rendering, because of considerations like webpage size. On mathematics-heavy pages, I found that pages that would otherwise be about 50KB in size got inflated up to about 1MB after server-side rendering all of the mathematics. After compression the difference was more like 70K, but this difference is the entire size of the (compressed) KaTeX library. I think it is completely reasonable to only transmit LaTeX markup over the wire, and have a client-side library take care of the presentation (as we do for HTML, SVG, ...).
I've also investigated MathML, but cross-browser support is terrible and has been for years. You also still get the size explosion problem, because LaTeX markup is just so much more compact than whatever MathML soup is equivalent.
[1]: https://katex.org/
I have use MathML with Latex2mathml python library https://github.com/roniemartinez/latex2mathml. And is great, the fact that you can render math without a single line of java script. But at the end, only Firefox fully supports MathML, without Chrome support is kind of useless.
This article is odd. I use pre-rendered KaTeX with remark [1], plus their stylesheet on the client side. All of the article seems more specific to MathJax than the title seems to convey.
[1]: https://remark.js.org
I use server rendered SVG with mathjax as part of my static site generator. To try to make it as accessible as possible I add a title element with an ID to each SVG and use an aria-labelledby attribute to connect the two [1] (a sample for the interested, scroll about half way down [2]). The title content is the unrendered LaTeX source.
I'm very interested in the notion of using HTML and CSS rendering though! Many thanks to the author for pointing out this functionality.
[1]: https://github.com/qubyte/qubyte-codes/blob/main/lib/render....