I agree that sometimes, it would be important not to do any interpretation. And there are certainly users who are more likely to want to type regular expressions than a formula. This is why I think an optional setting is a good idea. As long as it defaults to off, it's fully backwards compatible; at the same time it's there for those who want it. Probably the editor should also let you turn off the conversion to <math> after you begin editing (in case you usually want \( to begin an equation but you happen to be editing an article about regular expressions). Or turn it back on, in case you mistakenly turned it off. And I guess it should detect whether the sequences \[, \], \(, and \) appear in the original wikitext, and if they do, override your default and turn off the conversion (so that you don't accidentally damage the article).

A downside of templates is the number of keystrokes to enter them. No template-based solution is ever going to be as short as \( and \[.

I was about to write that there's a case where additional text on the same line can be handled automatically, namely when it's just punctuation. Putting a comma or a period outside the </math> tag is a fairly common typographical error which feels like it should be trivially fixable. But there are cases where that's wrong, like when the <math> tag ends with \end{align}. And there are cases which require editing the contents of the <math> tag, like when someone ended the formula with explicit whitespace like \, and \! to avoid HTML output. So really I think that this bot should:

I'm sympathetic to the idea of simplifying the rendering code. Any change should, at the least, not make it harder for editors to write formulas in wikitext. I think that's a strong argument for using <math> to mean <math display="inline"> and <mathblock> (or <dmath>, or <mathdisplay>, or something agreeable) to mean <math display="block">.

Maybe I should be more specific about what I had in mind. I did imagine that \[ and \] would remain in the wikitext. However I was not imagining that they would have special behavior outside of a <math> tag. That is, I was hoping to replace

I think @Izno's suggestion above is extremely promising. Syntax like <math display="block">, <mathblock>, or <dmath> will only ever be specific to MediaWiki. But math-inclined editors almost surely already know the meaning of \[ and $$, making constructions like <math>\[x=y\]</math> intuitive. That makes it likely that people will actually use this syntax. Backwards compatibility should be good: Right now, \[ and \] cause syntax errors, and I would be surprised if there were many intentional uses of $$. So this seems like a productive path forward.

It has been years since <math display="block"> was introduced, but as the previous link from @Esanders hints, :<math> is still more popular—despite its disadvantages. People have often complained about the relative difficulty of typing <math display="block>, so I wonder if the situation would be improved by introducing new tags that are easier to type. One could imagine new <mathblock> and <mathinline> tags. They would be synonyms for <math display="block"> and <math display="inline">. The existing <math> tag would not change.

No, someone wanting those can build them out of the appropriate symbols. I mean \operatorname{div}, \operatorname{grad}, \operatorname{curl}.

For examples of what David Eppstein is talking about, see for instance:

In T111712#1856565, @Esanders wrote:

It is a bit longer, but :<math> is semantically just plain wrong. We need to keep the wikitext sensible, but abusing other features (definition lists) to achieve the desired styling is untenable.

Having a separate alignment attribute sounds overly complicated to me. Ordinary mathematics publishing has just two types of equations, inline and displayed. All inline equations are formatted the same way and all displayed equations are formatted the same way, and that consistency makes everything more legible.

This problem is more about the interface between VE and the Math extension rather than a problem with either one of them. English Wikipedia has been using :<math> as the standard displayed equation format since I began editing as an IP over a decade ago. As Salix Alba noted, similar formatting is standard on all the other large Wikipedias. Because this formatting is everywhere, we're either in the uncomfortable situation of changing hundreds of thousands if not millions of articles, or we're in the unpleasant situation of VE users being unable to edit articles with displayed formulas (including not just mathematics, but also physics, chemistry, theoretical computer science, all branches of engineering, some biology articles,...).

In T99369#1480673, @Dginev wrote:

The format may have changed from gif to png to svg but the idea is the same.

I am sorry, but unless you have technically informed comments, I would really recommend that users focus on the presented quality of the displayed formulas.

I resent the "cognitive dissonance" personal attack, but I'll assume it was an accident.

In T99369#1464503, @Dginev wrote:

And you can install the MathJaX extension for your browser of choice, as mentioned earlier, nothing precludes that.

Given that Chrome simply does not support MathML, has not supported it for years, and is not likely to support it for years more, MathML is a red herring. It's irrelevant to this discussion.

@Physikerwelt: You seem to believe that the correct way to do mathematics rendering is through Mathoid. While Mathoid is a noble goal, MathJax works right now. Yes, there's integration work to be done, and no, I'm not saying it would be trivial. But doing MathJax integration right is still easier than what I think your goals for Mathoid are. Furthermore, it would allow us to get rid of the myriad rendering modes that MediaWiki currently supports. That's a step in the right direction, even if it's not perfect. I feel like this is a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good.

As best as I can tell from the plugin documentation at: