jsMath: Yay!
Via Brian Hayes: jsMath “…provides a method of including mathematics in HTML pages that works across multiple browsers under Windows, Macintosh OS X, Linux and other flavors of Unix. It…uses native fonts, so they resize when you change the size of the text in your browser, they print at the full resolution of your printer, and you don’t have to wait for dozens of images to be downloaded in order to see the mathematics in a web page. There…is no need to preprocess your web pages to generate any images, and the mathematics is entered in TeX form, so it is easy to create and maintain your web pages. Although it works best with the TeX fonts installed, jsMath will fall back on a collection of image-based fonts (which can still be scaled or printed at high resolution) or unicode fonts when the TeX fonts are not available.” The examples are impressive…
This is really awesome!
Wouldn’t it be nice if someone did the same for general diagramming? Whether flow-charts or typical boxes-and-arrows and perhaps even UML… would be nice to have the properties you describe (scalability, quality-printing, fast-loading).
The same kind of system should work — the Unicode character set includes things like lines and corners. You might be limited to 90-degree angles on everything, but would be better than nothing.
Sphinx uses this for embedded math in your documentation. Good stuff!