MathJax crashes if rendering target removed from document context

[ysulyma]

I have a single-page app that uses MathJax as well as AJAX navigation. If a user navigates away from a page before MathJax has finished rendering, it will try to access a span that no longer exists in the document, resulting in an error (and breaking all subsequent JavaScript execution). The error occurs at line 589 of jax/output/HTML-CSS/jax.js.

This is kind of strange given that MathJax has no problem with e.g. processing document fragments before they are inserted into the document.

How can I tell MathJax to abort rendering of these elements?

[dpvc]

It looks like the problem comes when MathJx looks up the math element by its ID, so if it has been removed from the document, it will no longer be able to find the math to process. I'll make a test to check that the element is actually found before processing it. That should take care of the problem.

How can I tell MathJax to abort rendering of these elements?

You can't, unfortunately. But it should ignore them (and isn't), so I will fix that. Normally, I'd recommend using MathJax's MathJax.Hub.Queue() command to synchronize your actions (like removing the DOM that MathJax is working on) with the typesetting being performed by MathJax. Pulling the rug out from under MathJax like this can lead to problems. See the documentation for details.