I am after some thoughts on why they would be doing this. I am a developer/designer and cannot think of any good reason for doing what can be done in CSS. Any ideas?<p>Sample : http://www4d.wolframalpha.com/Calculate/MSP/MSP6202195gdebi63ebi5b100001e27378a70be39cd?MSPStoreType=image/gif&s=46<p>* srry, for unclickable link
I asked Stephen Wolfram about this and he explained that it was because sometimes the answers contain complex mathematical formulae that are difficult to render in HTML and that since he wanted a consistent display, his preferred solution was to just use images all the time.
How strange... from their FAQ (under Web and other Practicalities - <a href="http://www.wolframalpha.com/faqs.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.wolframalpha.com/faqs.html</a>):<p>"Do I need images enabled in my browser to use Wolfram|Alpha?<p>Yes. All its output content is rendered as images, for consistency."<p>Perhaps they didn't want to make sure the data was styled & displayed well in all browsers (ahem... ie6)?<p>clickable: <a href="http://www4d.wolframalpha.com/Calculate/MSP/MSP6202195gdebi63ebi5b100001e27378a70be39cd?MSPStoreType=image/gif&s=46" rel="nofollow">http://www4d.wolframalpha.com/Calculate/MSP/MSP6202195gdebi6...</a>
I'd assume that not everything that WA puts out will be text or tables. They've got graphs, complex mathematical formulas, general purpose image manipulation and who knows what else.<p>It may have made sense to "unify" the rendering engine. This makes the simple case you point out look silly of course.
I don't know if I buy the consistency answer. There's ways to do that (even with complicated formula), but it is an interesting way to avoid x-browser CSS issues.<p>My own hunch is they did it to avoid scraping/botting. Hopefully they switch to text at some point in the future.
Pretty pathetic as it breaks the site for people with less than perfect vision. I mean they obviously take advantage of machine readable data to populate their database, pretty lame to not spit it back out. Not to mention a huge server overhead--this was a calculated decision.
We actually do the same for math equations in LearnHub lessons (via texhub.com). Images are pretty much the only way to present complex math equations to a wide audience.<p>MathML would be a much better solution only if it were natively supported in IE.