I'd love more tools for using TeX and markdown. There are a few but they're not really given as a first choice anywhere.
About MathML... I mean I'm also not a fan. I'm not sure anyone really is. I've been cursed to work with it in some legacy pages. I love using mathjax. I'm not familiar at all with the two people who from the company who worked on it or that project. But I think it's going a bit far to think that MathML was nefarious corporate plot to manipulate the W3C. (0) MathML doesn't interoperate with WolframLanguage in any particularly great or exclusive way. (1) MathML makes more sense for the time period it was introduced than it does now. Mathjax is technology I don't think people foresaw at the time (Reparsing the DOM and injecting some kind of formatted math notation?!) People really thought math notation would need to be expressed in an XML like format. The other option at the time afaik was static images you'd generate from LaTeX and insert into your document. (2) TeX is a language for typesetting math in a paper and people thought we'd need something that went deeper, representing something closer to the intended semantics of the notation. This was probably a mistake.
Afaik MathML didn't make it harder for people to use TeX on the web.
Oh yes, definitely, I didn't mean that MathML was a nefarious corporate plot. Just that there's a tension between pragmatists and idealists: in this case those who just want to put math on the web for the common case in any way at all (images, MathJax, whatever works), and those who think/thought that semantics should be encoded, just as you said. (That's what the page I linked says too: "There was a danger during the 1990s that a standard would emerge for mathematical representation on the web that would be based on a TeX[…]-like typesetting language. This would have been disastrous […] To head off this possibility, Wolfram Research and Neil Soiffer decided to do everything they could to […]" etc.)
This tension has played out a few times in practice, e.g. when Wikipedia removed the (added in 2012) MathJax option and went back to images-only (2016? https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T99369) based to a large extent on arguments from people who are (still) MathML proponents (which I understand Wolfram may not be any more) — at least some of them are "semantic" advocates who believe in "structured" math input rather than "presentation" markup. So there's some conflict there.
(Anyway, this is all historical and unrelated to Wolfram Cloud.)
I'd love more tools for using TeX and markdown. There are a few but they're not really given as a first choice anywhere.
About MathML... I mean I'm also not a fan. I'm not sure anyone really is. I've been cursed to work with it in some legacy pages. I love using mathjax. I'm not familiar at all with the two people who from the company who worked on it or that project. But I think it's going a bit far to think that MathML was nefarious corporate plot to manipulate the W3C. (0) MathML doesn't interoperate with WolframLanguage in any particularly great or exclusive way. (1) MathML makes more sense for the time period it was introduced than it does now. Mathjax is technology I don't think people foresaw at the time (Reparsing the DOM and injecting some kind of formatted math notation?!) People really thought math notation would need to be expressed in an XML like format. The other option at the time afaik was static images you'd generate from LaTeX and insert into your document. (2) TeX is a language for typesetting math in a paper and people thought we'd need something that went deeper, representing something closer to the intended semantics of the notation. This was probably a mistake.
Afaik MathML didn't make it harder for people to use TeX on the web.