I know it's rendering to HTML/SVG whatever, but I still think that belongs client-side.
It's better to do it on the client because it's generally better to send less information over the wire, as well as send information in its most unprocessed form.
This applies, for example, to charts as well -- far better to send the raw data series values to the client and render it on the client-side with a charting library.
Both of these cases have the huge advantage that if you want to use the equation or data yourself, you can just "view source" or "inspect" and grab the equation or data directly to copy.
I don't think we need to be too concerned about the fact there's a slight delay in rendering equations. People are pretty used to browsers loading everything gradually, whether waiting for images to be the last thing to appear, or even lazy loading of images. There's nothing wrong with that.
It's better to do it on the client because it's generally better to send less information over the wire, as well as send information in its most unprocessed form.
This applies, for example, to charts as well -- far better to send the raw data series values to the client and render it on the client-side with a charting library.
Both of these cases have the huge advantage that if you want to use the equation or data yourself, you can just "view source" or "inspect" and grab the equation or data directly to copy.
I don't think we need to be too concerned about the fact there's a slight delay in rendering equations. People are pretty used to browsers loading everything gradually, whether waiting for images to be the last thing to appear, or even lazy loading of images. There's nothing wrong with that.