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PDF fetishism and blindly disliking HTML because it's associated with the current web is such an old trope. HTML and CSS are _good_ at making hypertext documents, they are in fact much better at that than at making applications, despite that being the most popular use case lately.
No one is making you write web apps, websites are still first class citizens for web browsers.
LaTeX is not equivalent to PDF, though that is one publishing format it supports.
HTML lacks numerous features which a first-class document-specification language should have, including grid layouts (only very recently possible), footnotes and sidenotes, and formulae.
The promise of LaTeX is that documents could be defined _strictly_ in semantic terms, though my belief is that this would last for approximately 37.229 minutes after such a proposal actually hit the Web.
The underlying failure of HTML is that it is runtime compiled, not precompiled. This makes things far easier on authors and publishers, and far worse for readers. In the early days, the former mattered in order to incentivise content. Last I checked, incentivising content is no longer the Web's principle problem.
I've also been leaning toward LaTeX as a document speification language for hypertext systems, though I don't believe that alone is sufficient to fix the Web's ills.
> The promise of LaTeX is that documents could be defined strictly in semantic terms, though my belief is that this would last for approximately 37.229 minutes after such a proposal actually hit the Web.
I mean, that already failed for LaTeX. To me it's kind of an unwieldy pile of wierd imperative imports. I did write my thesis in it, but for the most part it was "smash these imports together, pray for the best, if it doesn't work, try a different collection of imports, don't bother trying to fix your imports, settle for "least bad" -- which, of course, was better than MS word". I used to do my resumes too, with the same spray and pray feel. Now I just write a markdown file, and anyone that cares that the resume is poorly formatted I probably don't care to work for (many places sanitize resumes to a single format anyways, i suppose for non-discrimination purposes).
Honestly, even though I myself can't use CSS effectively, what little bit I can use feels like CSS is converging to that declarative-layout-that-is-separate-from-document-contents philosophy that LaTeX tried to do, with the major distinguishing point that LaTeX had a huge "start with sane defaults" selling point, and CSS most definitely does not start with sane defaults.
> I mean, that already failed for LaTeX. To me it's kind of an unwieldy pile of wierd imperative imports
You need to try TeXmacs (which, despite its name, is _not_ based on TeX ;-) ).
www.texmacs.org
What would sane defaults for css be?
I'd like to see something far closer to my "Motherfucking Website" variant:
https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB
There are a few bits of that I'd fiddle with, but the idea of defining margins and avoiding text that runs flush to gutters, as well as defining most of the whitespace in rem & em units rather than pixels or points, is a big part of it.
Another alternative would be a stock set of document types for which users could choose from predefined styles. The document would specify the doctype, the user the styling. That could include various branding or simiilar components, but they'd be reasonably minimal.
The ever-encroaching headers, footers, sidebars, floating interstitials, etc., of the modern web really need to go DIAF.
Maybe I spoke too soon -- Thinking back (and I could be wrong about this) but the "top" of the style sheet cascade is supposed to be defined by the browser? So I guess it's the browers' responsibility?
I guess the point I was trying to make is that if you just type only non-layout LaTeX it looks reasonably good, yeah, it does format it with super-wide margins (shrug), but if you do that with html you get mouth spiders.
How would you support multiple screen resolutions or even resizing windows with precompiled layouting?
If layouting (an computationally expensive step) is done at "run-time" what would precompiled even mean?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29372589
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29372490
Footnotes and sidenotes can be realized as <aside> elements and styled/scripted to appear as actual footnotes on print media. Formulas are supported via MathML.
Neither are native first-class elements of plain HTML.
Nor a "first-class" TeX element either. \footnote is just a macro.
We're discussing LaTeX.
TeX itself is a set of typesetting primitives. LaTeX is a set of structurally-semantic, document-oriented macros built on TeX.
Latex is not semantic, the fact it's using macro (which are factoring function calls) says it all. There is some degree of separation between content and presentation, but that's it.
LaTeX as designed is generally semantic (formatting is left to the applied style), and whilst HTML5 is in theory reasonably semantic, in practice, LaTeX tends to be _used_ far more semantically than HTML is.
Some of those reasons are technical, though as noted elsewhere in this subthread, economic and other factors seem more dominant, and I severely doubt that LaTeX _on its own_ will address the broader scope of issues raised in TFA.
Is this why after all these years there is STILL no sane way to make accessible pdfs from LaTeX?
LaTeX is almost never semantic. People are encountered to think only about the document presentation (mostly due to LaTeX's own failures).
As for footnotes being "first class". It's just a macro, nothing first-class about that when compared to HTML's solution.
"After all these years" being the four and change since the tagged-PDF standard ISO 32000-2, 14.8 was released, in January 2017?
https://www.pdfa.org/resource/iso-32000-pdf
The LaTeX project announced an a16y project in January of this year. A tool is now available, though success varies.
https://www.latex-project.org/publications/indexbytopic/pdf/
Of footnotes: LaTeX has the macro, it's common across multiple document types. HTML does not.
What do you mean by “runtime compiled”, exactly?
With LaTeX, the document creator _must compile the document_, through a fairly persnickety processor (latex, tetex, or an equivalent). Whilst that may still pass poorly-structured documents and result in poorly-formed output, straight-up illegal syntax won't make.
HTML has no such requirements. There's absolutely nothing stopping you from posting that in the first place. Throw something at a browser, and it will try its damndest to ingest it --- that's the "runtime compiled" element of the Web.
(It's not a perfect analogy to software compilation, though it can get surprisingly close.)
Essentially: the Web lacks _any_ editor role. That's long been touted as a benefit. At scale, however, and over time ... it becomes problematic.
Moreover, the _commercial_ Web has a selection process and corresponding evolutionary path which has come to be seen as less than optimal for those seeking high-value, high-relevance content. It is in fact _hostile_ to such content, on multiple bases.
Again, LaTeX alone won't fix these problems. It addresses a few issues of structure. The concept of a post-authoring compliation state (ironically itself somewhat present in many web content-management systems, but not oriented around the document or content itself for the most part, but rather branding, advertising, and surveillance instrumenting) is also somewhat attractive but ... problematic. A discovery-mechanism scoring penalty might help (and Google's certainly applied that in other areas).
> Moreover, the commercial Web has a selection process and corresponding evolutionary path which has come to be seen as less than optimal for those seeking high-value, high-relevance content. It is in fact hostile to such content, on multiple bases.
That aspect has absolutely nothing to do with the technical format of a document.
That's a large part of my larger point. It wasn't, however any aspect of the question you'd asked, and I'd answered.
That said, and despite some quite strong semantic elements to HTML (and HTML5 especially), and the semantic/presentation separation of HTML/CSS, what we're getting, what seems to be encouraged by, and what the adtech-profiting browser vendor and driver of Web browser development seem to be encouraging, is not in fact well-structured, meaningful, high-value, high-relevance documents.
You're absolutely correct that the core of the problem isn't the technical format. But the technical format's become infected by that core problem.
"must"? A web4 browser would probably use a "runtime compiled" implementation.
"Whilst that may still pass poorly-structured documents and result in poorly-formed output" - this by the way happens much more often with LaTeX compared to html in my experience.
A LaTeX document is virtually never directly consumed by a reader. It's first converted ("compiled") into some consumable format. Typically PDF/Postscript, though there can be numerous others.
You seem to be unfamiliar with this aspect of the system?
Don't make assumptions about me. A LaTeX document is also virtually never directly consumed by web browsers.
In addition to that we are considering LaTeX for the web, not DVI, not PDF, not something else that you compile LaTeX into.
And well, given the amount of people that use overleaf I would say that a lot of people (although writers instead of readers) consume LaTeX.
(Btw, you can compile html too, try printing it as ps/pdf document)
That the Web is principally oriented around HTML is something of an accident of history. Note that any data can be transferred over HTTP(S), including, on occasion, either compiled or uncompiled LaTeX.
I am not making assumptions about what you do or do not know. I'm telling you how you're being perceived. You have the power to alter that perception. You've failed to use it.
We don’t see html raw either dude
Username checks out. It's not the same: HTML is interpreted and often modified on the fly (with JavaScript), with the source being a click away, but it's still just HTML. On the other hand Latex documents are compiled into other formats like PDF that are distributed, instead of the Latex source.
Correct, further:
- The compilation means that there's at least a check for syntactic validity before any old crap is published.
- JS-based HTML can be fully dynamic to the extent that there's no sense of an underlying document at all. There are times when this is useful. That is an exceedingly small minority of the cases in which it is used. The fact that it's often preferable to rerender an HTML document as PDF, _simply for readability_, let alone archival, should speak volumes.
I talked about the compilation aspect at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29372937
In addition to that there are various checkers for html.
There is lua-based LaTeX and js-based pdf. Just use html without JS.
"The fact that it's often preferable to rerender an HTML document as PDF, simply for readability, let alone archival, should speak volumes."
The fact that it's always preferable to export a LaTeX document as pdf...
Username checks out? Are people who compile markdown, org (or even LaTeX) via pandoc into html somehow "garbage coders"?
Well the article title is clickbait, the author wants the web to move to plaintext, but doesn’t actually seem to suggest moving away from plain html and css.
(Still a bit silly though since the author does mention latex as an alternative too).
The only useful part of the article was the holding up of two example websites. If the whole article had been an informative survey of websites done right, it would have been a much more worthwhile read. The problem of monetization through serving ads that the author points out won't be solved by reverting to HTML only or even to text only. If a website costs money to host or create content for then it must generate revenue to pay the bills unless the author has other means of doing so. Making websites smaller will reduce those costs but won't eliminate them.
UBI is a non-answer to this, implementing it won't allow everyone to quit their jobs and make art instead. Ideally it's meant to be a social safety net, not a way to sponge off of "billionaires paying their taxes" and no ideal survives contact with implementation. We could hope for a marginal improvement on welfare at best (and that would be a good thing, even small improvements count).
The current web can and should be improved upon. Web browsers are in a "worst (that works) is best" situation after having roughly solved the software distribution problem. We need to take these lessons and move on to something better. Seamless execution of software in a sandboxed environment. That's how you solve the current state of the web, build something that is better suited to what people are trying to shoehorn into browsers and they will move all of their bloated apps off of the web leaving only pristine documents behind.
>UBI is a non-answer to this, implementing it won't allow everyone to quit their jobs and make art instead. Ideally it's meant to be a social safety net, not a way to sponge off of "billionaires paying their taxes" and no ideal survives contact with implementation. We could hope for a marginal improvement on welfare at best (and that would be a good thing, even small improvements count).
TBF I don't think the author meant to imply that we should "allow everyone to quit their jobs and make art instead". If we agree that the article is largely lamenting the extortive/exploitative nature of modern society cum digital medium than I'd wager what's in mind is UBI as counter-balance to the increasingly extortive/exploitative labor relations many people are living with. We're sorta getting a taste of this with the effect of exceptional unemployment benefits but that's temporary.
Exactly, HTML would be amazing if people weren't trying to use browsers as application runtime environments.
So we shouldn't have had Youtube, Vimeo etc. until W3C got around to making <video> part of the official spec in 2010?
The web is great because people kept pushing its limits and weren't arbitrarily held back by bureaucrats. Even though Apple and Google have spent untold billions to push the "there's an app for that" line of thinking, the web has survived.
We had them, it was a matter of installing Real, Flash and Quicktime plugins.
Your insane perspective and the fact that it is common, is why the internet sucks.
1. Youtube is just a generic video hoster, of which many came before, during, and will come after. As for the whole "pretend Youtube is a thing" thing, I can't remember one actual good video from a "content creator" ever. It's all circle jerking and quick videos on a topic based on least effort.
2. <video> tag has never had a single good implementation. They are all bugged and 100x slower/clunkier than using the built in menu on a CRT TV from the early 90s.
3. Yes, the web would be better if it was just static content. Even without <video> tag. The primary use of a <video> tag is clickbait (actually, almost nobody uses a <video> tag because they don't want to host video, and instead use a youtube embed, so <video> is not even used in practice). For anything else, like movies, porn, etc, it's 1000x more convenient to just download the video and watch it offline in a real video player like MPV. Web browsers still cannot even turn off that stupid "you are now in full screen" banner at the top of the screen, which fortifies my point that <video> is not good for what it is intended for: short one-off clips scattered throughout web pages.
4. The whole idea that it's hard to have a video tag is a product of licesnsing braindamage and the clusterfuck of video encoding standards.
5. The web is not great, and I try to avoid it as much as possible. Using a god damn terminal emulator (the most braindamaged obsolete shit in the world) is 1000x more pleasant than using a web browser.
So write an application multiple times in multiple languages, package it into different packages, and distribute them through app stores? Oh, and desktop Linux users are out of luck because their market share is so tiny, and their distros are so numerous and chaotic that no-one is going to bother spending time and money on building applications for those poor sods. Is this the idea?
How about write an application specifically designed to execute code that you give it in a safe environment. Then you only have to make that application crossplatform and everyone can target it instead. People write for the browser because it is a sandbox, store front, package manager, UI kit all rolled into one. If some smart cookie decides to forget about the web and build to that spec they could come up with a better alternative.
I've thought about this. The thing is that the current relevant browser environments (basically Safari, Chrome, and Firefox) require, what, a billion dollars a year to maintain? 2 billion? And this doesn't even count the various JavaScript frameworks, auth systems, CDNs, etc.
Any replacement technology/protocol which does the same "write once, use everywhere" thing and manages to perform better would still need to achieve wide adoption. And I feel like users would still want that to be able to play seamlessly with everything in their lives that they have online.
It would certainly be a challenge but there are examples of cross platform applications that have succeeded in the market. The Godot game engine is a good one since it does a similar thing for a different segment of the market. It's cross platform and allows you to build applications that target those platforms and more (even the web!). So these things are within the reach of a small team, or even a single dedicated individual. The important thing is to focus on what matters. Providing a safe environment to run code downloaded from strangers, a set of configurable UI elements and an API for making network and storage requests. You're basically building a VM with a UI kit and some networking. You could probably bootstrap up from something simple since it would likely be a fun platform to target for hobbyists, if you could build a community or scene around it.
Which step in that process could _not_ be automated? What's so fucking difficult on either writing a Cross-Platform UI or using a Cross-Platform framework?
<rant>
Is it not instead the case that today's hipster developers simply want to _ignore_ that platforms exist beside their fancy McBooks? Is it not the case that today's developers prefer a bizarre interpreted untyped language simply because that's what they learned for building websites and they don't want to put up the effort to understand what a type system is? Is it not true that the same developers pull in dependencies reflexivly and never consider long-term maintenance, let alone such weird concepts like supply chain security?
And finally did not some hip leaders invent the microservice architecture to cater to these idiots? Because it's nowadays simpler to have a huge, inefficient, pile of services that hides all complexity in the communication between these services than to have one well-designed, efficient system?
</rant>
Sorry for the rant, but sometimes I feel like the industry is actually regressing because many developers are simply lazy morons that hide behind buzzwords.
Please suggest a cross platform framework that doesn't come with accessibility issues, that also allows you to create as rich ui's like what you can do in a browser, and without various licenses that restrict what you can do with your code? Something that supports Android, iOS, Linux, Windows and MacOS.
I feel that it's cheating here to include android and ios in this list, since so much stuff that is developed either:
* is only for those two (and sometimes only one of those) platforms
* the preferred "version" on those platforms in an app, rather than web-based
It's clear from the scope of the mobile app market that there's a huge marketplace for a kind of application that essentially never existed on desktops. It seems a little bold to insist that the same x-platform toolkit must service mobile and desktop contexts, when so much is different between them, in particular display size and interaction style. Even more so when the evidence seems to be that not even the web has really managed to do this.
And yet HTML+CSS+JS which is so hated for making applications handles the use case of working across mobile and desktop almost perfectly. Maybe it's not just because we don't want to learn real programming like the grandparent post insinuated and instead a perfectly viable solution to the problem at hand.
If it is handled so perfectly by web tech, why do mobile apps exist?
> What's so fucking difficult on either writing a Cross-Platform UI or using a Cross-Platform framework?
It's been a long time since I used a cross-platform framework so maybe things have gotten better but what used to happen was that I'd run across something in them that didn't work right and then I'd have to do one of:
1. Just not use that in my application,
2. Implement that thing outside the framework which required me to (1) know how to do that thing natively and (2) figure out how to make my implementation work with the rest of the app that was using the framework, or
3. Figure out how to fix the bug in the framework which required me to (1) dive into the framework's internals and (2) probably required me to know how to do the thing natively.
Framework internals are complicated. This complexity is expected--when you are writing a native application you only need the complexity that is inherent in doing whatever it is that application is doing whereas a framework has to be flexible and general enough to serve the needs of a wide variety of applications.
If the framework is going to make me dive into its internals to get it to work there is a good chance that the total effort of making my app run on two or three platforms via the framework will be more than writing separate native apps for those platforms.
Many developers in the industry have simply realized that the flexibility of html/css/js is simply unmatched by any other technology out there. Nothing else out there has been subjected to such extreme levels of scrutiny the web has. Nothing. Afaik, even the Dragon capsules use it for the UI layer.
But since you're such a boi genius, make something that can match and get ahead of it and i'm sure everyone will jump on your boat. Until then, your opinion will remain objectively useless.
Pyramids were also built with a lot of effort. But in the end it was a pile of stones. Architecture was created when labor and material saving technology like the arch was invented. We are in the pyramid phase with the web.
I understand what you are trying to say but you could not have picked a worst example in your analogy. I mean an arch in the end will also be a pile of stones. On top of that we have no idea how the pyramids were made, their precise dimensions and alignment would be extremely hard to replicate using modern technology.
I say we are the arch phase of the web, we understand the arch and it has served us well and it does save a little bit on materials. What we want to do is create bigger and better engineered structures like the pyramids.
Well since you know what phase we're in, and that we're in a phase even, then surely you must know what and when the revolution is. So cut the chatter and get us there. Why waste time?
Buzzwords like type system?
Or target the JVM, ship jar files, and solve the problem ~25 years ago.
We need an improvement, not a regression.
Jar files are a single file portable to all major platforms (and many minor), that can run offline and have entirely acceptable performance with modern versions and modern hardware (i.e. slower than C but perfectly good if JS in a browser is the comparison). They have inferior security vs browser sandboxing but better no worse than a native binary. Other than being "old", what exactly is the regression?
The webassembly crew is pretty much doing exactly this.
They've worked pretty closely with the folks who designed java bytecode, to try to learn from their institutional knowledge (repeating what they felt they did well, but learning from their perceived mistakes).
It hopefully will end up really nice, because it could provide us with a machine-agnostic IR that will work everywhere, have high performance, and if it becomes popular on the web, I could it leaking into the desktop space and starting to become a standard there as well.
I wish we still had applets. They sucked on dial-up, but that's not really a problem anymore.
I don’t have much experience with web development, but lately I’ve been wondering, though, if those using browsers as application runtime environments should go all the way and eschew the DOM in favor of presenting a GUI in a WebGL canvas? Theoretically, the combination of WebGL and Webassembly may be an attractive platform for developing cross-platform applications. We already have Electron apps, but instead of using HTML+CSS+JavaScript, we use tools inspired by desktop GUI development tools that render to a WebGL canvas and compile to Webassembly?
That already exists, but it would also mean the end of end-user customizations. As mentioned by sibling poster, accessibility would be nonexistent, but one also could not use adblockers, copy text, etc.
Sure, one /could/ do that. And most web based games do that but then you have to re-invent a whole bunch of stuff. Scrolling, text layout, accessibility hooks, etc.
Or have a Google team size,
https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-...
I've used LaTeX for the duration of my Bachlor studies. The results are superior to Word, but that's just about where the benefits end. It's a nightmare to use and I don't see how investing time to learn it will benefit me in the long run.
Yeah LaTeX needs some actually useful error messages first before it can be considered for something that people use widely. It's crash logs are even less useful than C++ and that's saying something. You basically have to do guesswork to figure out what might be wrong if the damn thing won't compile.
My BSc thesis wasn't the first thing I wrote in it, but it likely will be the last one. The idea is good, the execution is a resounding meh.
If you use overleaf, after compilation, they parse the log file and try to give you better guesses of what each error message is. Also, if you click on an error they redirect you to a help page with what you can do about it.
Hopefully, whatever they do can be intergraded to offline latex tools like latexmk.
Error messages are like the least horrible wart in LaTeX's mile-long list of warts.
I have the complete opposite experience. I used word for years and years. I started studying a bit later in life and learned latex first when I was 27. I was flabbergasted that it was not the default tool in the business world. Now I'd rather take an ice bath then write a larger document in word.
I still really disagree with the poster though. Latex is not a good fit for Web pages.
The article actually says latex is not a good fit for the web, but the philosophy behind it is what they think should be adopted
What’s wrong with Word? Modern businesses are turning increasingly to document formats like Google Docs and Quip in my experience: online editing solutions where documents are stored online and are as easy to share at any stage in their lifecycle as sharing a hyperlink.
Quip has extremely basic editing features, to the extent that I sometimes find it stifling. However, it does a great job at providing 95% of what most business documents need: several headings sizes, paragraphs, numbered and bulleted lists, and the ability to embed pictures - with great collaboration tools.
Quip as a medium is like Hacker News comments. You don’t have a lot of formatting options to work with so you focus on the content rather than messing about with styling.
Most business documents are written and read in a short period of time. Both of the tools show you who from your organization is reading the document for collaborative reviews and allow people to add comments on content inline. Google Documents allows people to make suggested changes that the author/editor can review and accept, incorporating the edit into the document; or the author can share the document and allow people to make changes to it directly.
For example, when my team is having planning meetings, or we are reviewing a project plan, etc. the primary author will often project/screenshare the document, while everyone else also loads it on their computer. We can each see where everyone else’s cursor is (or highlights) and all edit the document simultaneously (if the author wishes) or leave feedback/suggest edits - that we can all see.
These kinds of features matter more in a business environment in my experience more than the ability to format documents in complex ways.
Personally, I find Quip too simplistic, because it does not handle things well like having multiple paragraphs plus a code block in a numbered list item. Google Documents can also have issues with things like this, but I rarely run into something crucial that I cannot do. (But it does have missing features: for example there is no way to add line numbers to a document — but these are less important now that the convention is for everyone to review the document on their computer simultaneously, rather than printing them out).
I find Word to be the most powerful of all of these editing tools and have the easiest time getting it to do what I want. However, (at least the versions I’ve used) seems geared around writing and saving documents locally. It would be my choice of tool if I had to write a long business document and Google Docs wasn’t fitting the bill.
There’s probably a way to set up collaboration features with Word like with the other tools these days, but the “best” collaboration I’ve seen has been through SharePoint which was painful: people had to “check out” the document in order to make changes, etc. I imagine that with Office 365 Microsoft has something better now but if they do I have not had a chance to use it.
Quip and Google Docs “just work”. They are web applications so there is no difference in what is supported between OS versions like with the Word.
In my career as a software engineer & businessperson I’ve rarely needed more than these types of basic text editing tools to collaborate with and convey ideas to my colleagues. Making collaboration simple, including the ability to simultaneously edit a document, or enabling people to read a document at their leisure (asynchronously), and add comments/suggestions/edits - which always refer to the authoritative latest copy (none of this monkey business with emailing around copies of Word documents) provides far more value than advanced editing features would.
If a person can’t get their point across easily using Word’s defaults, perhaps customized a bit by choosing their preferred font, including diagrams where necessary, then I’d question whether the difficulty is the editing tool or something else.
Unless you are producing specialized documents such as academic research intended for publication, or legal documents intended for submission to a court, etc., in my experience business documents rarely need more formatting than Markdown can produce; and easy real-time collaboration is a massive value add.
It's still SharePoint but simultaneous editing works reasonably well (with auto save versioning instead of check outs and check ins).
I had great luck using pandoc instead of raw LaTeX. I'd just write the manuscript body in markdown, and use inline LaTeX for layouts and more complex figures that can't be replicated in Markdown. it also outputs .docx in case the prof wanted Word docs submitted digitally.
Try the more friendly WYSIWYG TeXmacs. Its output is comparable to TeX/LaTeX.
Or LyX.
No, no, no, that's not how Web<number>.0 works! You have to make it _worse_ as the number goes up.
Web 2.0 added more interaction, more tracking, and more advertizing.
Web 3.0 adds crypto scams.
If Web 4.0 is going anywhere near LaTeX, it needs to add not just the typesetting language, but also the whole system of peer-reviewed academic publishing, and you _have_ to publish at least 4 websites a year or perish.
Latex would certainly make it worse. Latex is among the worst languages (to use) that I've ever encountered.
Technically TeX is the language. LaTeX is a library of macros for TeX, that tries to make it easier to work with TeX.
Has anyone written the Web3.0 / Web4.0 TeX2NFT converter yet?
Heh.
Talk to Elsevier. I'm sure they'd like another source of cashflow.
All this being said, Reddit should copy Hacker News, Twitter should oust Jack Dorsey, Facebook should die, and billionaires should pay their goddamn taxes so we can implement Universal Basic Income. Doing this will enable actual good people to do actual good and useful work without having to rely on ads, difficult to come by donations, blockchain pyramid Ponzi schemes, or bullshit jobs
This was either written by a 20somethings who wasn’t there in the “good times” he is describing, or by someone who was there but still has the mindset of someone in their 20s.
I don’t know which is worse.
My thoughts exactly. Clickbaity title and clearly no substance. In my experience there is a strong negative correlation between the confidence and young age. A little disappointing this made it to the front page.
UBI is unequivocally a good thing.
Maybe, but liquidifing all wealth of all US billionaires at once (built over decades), even if it's possible (it isn't), would give UBI of $12000 for single year.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4+trillion+dollars+div...
Side note: Wolfram Alpha is just the best
That is exactly the naive mindset he is talking about.
Yeah, and he's wrong.
No. Tex is procedural. It's an execute-only language, not a declarative one. It would result in documents as rigid as PDF documents.
The other direction, constraint-based layout, is more useful. A is above B, C is to the right of D. Put all those into a constraint analyzer and come up with a layout. This is a 2D geometry problem and should be solved graphically, not procedurally. Nobody knew how to write constraint solvers thirty years ago, and they can be compute-intensive, but those are solved problems now.
A good example of a system which does this is the 2D sketch system in Autodesk Inventor and Fusion 360. Those are true parametric constraint solving systems. Plus, unlike web systems, they can do curves.
Can’t wait to hardcode styling for each individual display that is out there!
go latex! Make everyone miserable, not just the math people.
This was my first counterargument to his post. Latex can be used to make amazing documents but, it is a pain in the ass to learn. If they simplified latex in a similar vain to HTML2 -> HTML5, then it starts to look reasonable.
I think his frustration is misplaced on the medium of content. He is addressing the same issue everyone else has, the fragmentation of information. The internet isn't a one stop shop anymore. You are forced to cycle through huge amounts of reposts and micro-posts to get anything useful.
LaTeX can output to fluid-format document types (e.g., ePub), and there are tools that will convert between numerous output formats (pandoc).
Even if you're looking at mobile displays, there's a finite set, and those can either be punted or targeted precisely at the 4", 5", 6", 8", and 10" device sizes which are most common.
Using an e-ink device, I'd _really_ prefer more Web content were paginated. I tend to rely on the EinkBro web browser for anything over a page or two in length simply because I can page through that rather than deal with the fussiness of scrolling.
Once you reach a sufficiently large display, physical pragmatics come to the fore. We've settled on books that are mostly 8--14" or so diagonal measure _because that's what's convenient to hold and read_. There are smaller and larger exceptions (pocketbooks and other miniatures, coffee-table books and atlases), but those are 1) less convenient and 2) clear compromises between format, material, ease of reading, and other factors.
For a sufficiently-large desktop display, a standard quarto/folio print format displayed 2-up is usually preferable. Scaling from that or presenting 1-up is really the desktop / window manager's problem.
It cannot do any of that. My research has long summations and they have to be broken manually to multi-lines. Tables are a mess. Spacing between paragraphs is a hit-or-miss. Figures again need to be hardcoded, tailored to the target output.
If your standard is to just throw information with random formatting on a screen that ultimately cannot be read, then yes latex can do that for you.
But if that is your goal, pure html suffices.
Yeah ebooks made from Latex look horrible to me. Worse then HTML documents. But it is ok for preferences to differ.
The stock styling of LaTeX's article or book document types is sufficient. I read them often. The point being that that is a _starting point_ but not _the full extent_ of LaTeX formatting and presentation. This objection is about as valid as dismissing HTML on the basis of the default element styling characteristics.
LaTeX-produced documents can be extensively styled, that's handled via a stylesheet.
Rappaport's _Philosophy of Computer Science_ is one book I'm aware of created via LaTeX. It's quite readable:
http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/Papers/phics.pdf
I'm trying to remember which book it was that I'd encountered published _as LaTeX source_ which I had to comile myself. I can only say that it was quite elegant.
There are numerous alternative templates for books available elsewhere, e.g.:
https://www.latextemplates.com/cat/books
"e.g., ePub"
So, at the end you are going to serve html at the browser.
You can do that with web1
The assertion was that there is too great a diversity of device sizes for a LaTeX-based document standard to work, with the strong implication being that a fixed-size PDF is the _only_ output option for LaTeX.
Both sides of that fail.
You're now shifting the goalposts.
Yes, ePub is based on HTML. It is also contained, standardised, and structured (not dissimilarly to how LaTeX itself is based on Tex but with standards and structure). It's also not the only fluid document standard, though the other I'm significanlty aware of (mobi in particular) are effectively proprietary.
ePub _exists_ and is _good enough_.
It has some issues of its own, including an overly-strong foundation in HTML which could well lead it to many of the same issues plagueing the Web. In practice, to date, it's largely avoided those pitfalls.
But again, that's really not what the question I was answering was about. Rather it was in targeting multiple sizes of devices. And I think I somewhat addressed that.
I was certain the title was a joke. After reading the article, I’ll continue to assume this is an elaborate joke for the sake of my sanity.
It's obviously a joke. He's using hyperbole to make a point.
That's what everyone is missing. It's just to make a point... but people are taking it literally. He means "back to the basics"; e.g., plain text.
It's a good title because I laughed when I read it and it made me want to read the article.
I don't know about Web4 and LaTex specifically but Web5 tech will surely be reverting to communication with mouth sprayed color pigments sketching images on cave rocks.
I believe this is just an elaborate complaint: The author simply expresses the disgust that many feel of how the utopic promise of the internet and digital technology more general (as captured, say, in the early TED sessions) has translated into a dystopia that does not seem able to find a bottom.
Maybe the promise was fake to start with, maybe mixing a pliable and ultimately "social" technology with a broken economic/political system could never have produced healthy offspring.
In any case, we are in a sort of purgatory, waiting for some miracle to absolve people and make them feel good again about their trade.
I see the author's point.
However it focuses almost entirely on the idea of documents/information retrieval.
The web would not be at today's scale if it focused on written-word documentation. For better or worse, most individuals are spending their time online for entertainment.
Which is probably why most of the web now consists of SEO optimized entertainment that some people take way too seriously, e.g. conspiracy theories.
One of the worst ones is "[famous person's] net worth". People take the Google-provided snippet (sourced from some garbage website) at face value.
I agree. This will continue to get worse, the general quality of search engine results is deteriorating.
This, but ironically.
Seriously, LaTeX is an abhorrent language, mixes paradigms even though they shouldn't be. I agree that content should prevail over style, and that's *precisely* what LaTeX doesn't do. It's a language devised for nice typesetting (of maths mostly), with paper in mind as this was the most common information medium used in the 70s, and not fit at all for modern display techniques, with viewports of different sizes and characteristics.
What HTML, CSS and Javascript got right is the division of content, form and function. Even though modern trends tend to abuse this to produce bad websites and we should make more simple designs, there is no way LaTeX will acheive this at any point.
I see this argument so often and it simultaneously dumbfounds me and intrigues me. It’s inane, rose-tints the early internet, and focuses on one small part of the internet (websites) as being valuable and tosses the rest aside.
But the idea that we could make an internet that separates concerns again is very tantalizing to me. What if web services served data in a standardized, presentation-independent format, e.g. articles as plain html? What if those services then offered web apps to view content and competes to make the best viewers? Could we get back to a content-first model that still encouraged business to flourish?
That's already happening with the Gemini protocol. It now has a myriad of browsers, each with their own style. My personal favourite is Lagrange
https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange
I adore Gemini, but what I’m imagining here is something that serves a wider range of web use cases, which Gemini does not support, by design.
Surprised not to see a mention of gemini. But ultimately it's the same spirit. It's in the air. Society and economy re-rooted itself over IP (let's find a cute acronym for that). That said I don't see the sad web trend stopping, my bet is that it may very well evolve into ubiquitous world wide allocation web where the network will track and optimize exchanges ala bitcoin/ethereum (don't jump on me yet, I'm not promoting crypto.. but I think they're a hint of how information and physical systems will intertwine).
_I mainly want to communicate by text_
The web is no longer about communicating, especially the parts the author complains about (framework-driven apps, JavaScript, social networks, etc). It's about working, creating, and broadcasting to large groups. That's not _necessarily_ a bad thing (although if you write a blog no doubt it feels a bit bad having to fight for attention with tweets and stuff).
The very simple fact is that the web has changed. It's not a place where people publish text articles for their audience to read any more. It's a distribution platform for users to create things with rich, diverse apps. There are a ton of problems with it (privacy, security, ownership, sharing, etc), but none of them will be fixed by moving to a different technology. The problems the web has are people problems, not tech problems.
I’ve been steering into “just write” territory as well. And for me it’s Markdown instead of Latex. Easy to write, simple rules, sufficient formatting.
Would be interesting to imagine a parallel universe where the web is a bunch of Markdown documents linking to each other. Like Obsidian, but global and shared.
You mean like Gemini?
https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
I definitely need to check it out. Thanks for the link!
the disconnect here is that the web browser isn't a document viewer (but the author here wants it to be just that). and yeah, html is a _document markup language_, but the problem is that it's not what we _actually want_ - we want cross-platform, sandboxed applications with instantaneous delivery. practically no one really cares about "hypertext" - that's not where the majority of value for most people lies.
>"we want cross-platform, sandboxed applications with instantaneous delivery"
My version of "we" wants:
a) Plain websites that are just documents with links and navigation.
b) Yes browser based applications please.
c) Yes native apps please as the browser is severely restricted (and for good reasons) on what it allows those apps to do.
Each part is equally important to "we"
i also prefer native apps for doing anything, but the collective "we" has already decided otherwise, and there's no point fighting that tide.
>"collective "we" has already decided otherwise"
It has not. Many native applications are doing just fine. I have one native desktop based as a product with about 40,000 customers and is growing.
The fact that 90% are doing _A_ does not mean that the rest 10% doing _B_ are unprofitable or less important. "Niche" markets (I could hardly call native apps niche yet) can be very attractive.
Yes. Browsers are great at presenting beautiful webpages, the best compliment to that would be an application that opens when you click on "try our app", downloads a nice compressed binary, and executes it in a sandboxed environment that works on every platform. Maybe that can be successfully built into browsers but I believe it could be better done as a separate project with a fresh start.
I wrote a little R package to write tables. I knew what HTML tables and Word tables could do. I wrote the interface to use all those features. LaTeX nerds were super proud of their tables. Should be easy to reimplement the features in TeX, right?
https://github.com/hughjonesd/huxtable/blob/master/R/latex.R
TeX is an abomination from hell.
This is not constructive in my opinion. Some people say that the web was better in its early days when there was just HTML. HTML or LaTex, which the author recommends, may be sufficient for documents, but if you want that kind of an experience you can just use reader mode.
But opening an interactive prototype in Figma just by clicking a link or planning an event with Doodle just by clicking a link is not something I’d want to miss out on just to remove ads and cookie banners from websites. Sure loading speed would also be increased, but internet connections are getting faster and faster and most western countries have quite good coverage of fast networks.
The author also states that he/she doesn’t want to learn new web tech all the time, while server rendered PHP still works and powers a large portion of the internet. The web platform also doesn’t really have breaking changes, so your past knowledge still applies and old pages continue to work.
To me this is just an overreaction that doesn’t consider lots of usecases for the web.
Plain text as much as possible suffices for most websites; content and speed over style.
I generally agree with this - many websites are insanely over complicated. I should need to download react/angular/<popular JS framework>, load some JSON files, download a 100 MB title background image - just to read some text.
That said, I also except that _some_ websites do require these capabilities. But I believe they should need to justify it. If you can get away with just HTML/CSS, then you really should.
The way forwards would be for search engines to lower the ranking of websites that are bloated for no real reason. But this of course will not work when Google is the major search engine - because their entire business model is based on injecting some JS into a page and tracking you. They even make money up-selling you on their cloud services for resource intensive content.
Given that, the way forwards is actually likely to come from a browser supported advertising model - that respects anonymous browsing but also provides some guarantees to the advertiser. Then, size, bandwidth, position, etc, could all be factored in. The browser could even figure out whether the ad is rendered in a place where the user could have seen it.
Reddit should copy Hacker News
Reddit should revert to old Reddit and refresh the UI. I'm sure they had their reasons, but their current website is actively hostile towards mobile users.
billionaires should pay their goddamn taxes so we can implement Universal Basic Income
There aren't enough billionaires for everybody to stop working and it's a slippery slope. I know multiple generations of people that live on government handouts rather than work - they are not motivated to work at all. Whether or not on purpose, it encourage the creation of a surf class.
I do except that something needs to be done to address increasing wealth inequality, but it should be a self-sustaining system.
I like LaTeX, but I'm quite certain that this fairly powerful (not to mention Turing complete) programming language that happens to output documents most of the time (well, except when I write it, in which case it usually outputs error messages...) would be a bad basis for web development. We've been dealing with the rolling security nightmare of Javascript for the last couple decades, and that language was at least intended to be pointed at the internet. I suspect that to get LaTeX ready for the internet, we'd have to strip out everything fun.
A better plan would probably be to come up with some markup language for the internet that just describes the content and appearance of websites, rather than having everybody download little programs to generate websites on the fly. But of course that is the sort of pie-in-the-sky dream that we can only hope will occur in the far future of 30 years ago.
I agree with everything but the latex part. Something like HTML 3.2 is a better fit for hypertext documents. There's no need to re-invent anything, only remove the feature creep and cancerous bullshit.
That's easier said than done though, with everyone so invested in this modern game of "emperor's new clothes" that is the modern web.
I've used LaTeX for my bachelor thesis, but i found it such a pain that i wrote an markdown-to-latex converter in PHP, which i found to be less painful.
Today i finished an improved version of that converter in AWK, intending to use it to generate pretty PDFs from markdown, but aside from that, i wish not to interact much with LaTeX itself anymore..
Do you know about Pandoc?
Yes. Pandoc just got disabled (due to build failure) from my Linux distribution because the Haskell/GHC ecosystem is unhandy.
Maybe AWK is an ugly language, but its an on-board tool on all systems im using. In terms of getting it to run its superior to Haskell.
Must watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4dYwEyjZcY
The problem with HTML is the dom and all the clutter around it. It's not really readable, and require browsers to take decisions for ambiguous markup, which involves bloat.
The author's argument is essentially,
Billionaires should pay their taxes so we can finance giving everyone basic income, creators won't have to monetize the web, and humanity can live in peace.
Ah, what remarkably wishful naivete. There are so many faulty assumptions in that premise.
It assumes billionaires paying taxes would finance universal basic income. It would not.
It assumes there will always be billionaires to tax. But if we remove competitive incentives, there may well be few or no billionaires. (It's a testament to capitalism that it has not only raised myriads out of poverty, but also created legions of super wealthy.)
It assumes people who receive universal basic income will "no longer be pitted against each other." But competition will always exist; it's intrinsic to nature itself.
The author assumes people will be more virtuous if only we didn't have to work for a living. This is not true. Humans are terrible, and most of us are not bright creative luminaries who'd spend our time in productive or creative pursuits. Rather, most of us are lazy and selfish by nature at best, self-destructive at worst.
It assumes UBI would create peace for humanity. This is not true. Fighting, competition, and resource claiming is intrinsic to nature.
In short, this article has a clickbait headline -- it really has little to do with LaTeX -- and a remarkably naive conclusion.
You seem to believe that billionaires have each added billions of dollars of value to humanity.
> Rather, most of us are lazy and selfish by nature at best, self-destructive at worst.
"Speak for yourself."
I think PDF should be replaced with some SVG-based document format. HTMLs inability to model the concept of "pages" is something I'm missing from current web. Also, a LaTeX-style document creation language rendering into SVG would be really cool.
I would be fine if I could somehow generate an index for print. CSS kind of supports it, but that is only implemented by a few proprietary tools (yay web "standards").
Fully agree. And nowadays the HTML -> Print workflow is also used for generation of PDF or ebooks and it is extremely hacky. There should be more standard way to do it.
Most of the people in this thread are taking the article too seriously. It's obviously using hyperbole to make a point about how most web development is driven by fashion trends instead of fundamentals.
Unless you're the kind of person to print out physical copies of web pages (and I suspect OP may be one of these people), there's no reason to use LaTeX.
Pagination is for paper, not screens. Thus, PDFs, LaTex, and companions, have no place on the Web. [I wrote about this recently here.](
https://jonreeve.com/2021/05/stop-making-pdfs/
)
Pretty decent rant. I share some of the pain as laid out in the article.
As a long time troll myself, I think the whe LaTeX is just a vehicle.
In 1994, while working at UWashington CS&E, I hacked up NCSA Mosaic to render LaTeX (with href's). It was quite good (british quite or US quite is left for the reader).
Sadly, nobody else was interested, and they probably still won't be. One difference? in 2021, I agree with them.
How to fix it?
The problem is simple: client/server model
The solution then is to migrate towards an alternative.
I would be much more likely to believe the author if they didn't embed multiple videos in their screed against multimedia.
You can provide a plaintext experience if you think it's better, but clearly you don't.
I know not with what technology Web4 will be written, but Web5 will be written in crayon.
Yeah the Latex thingy is a click bait, but otherwise he has some good points
Latex and JS, latex for webapps, hahaha. Checks calendar.
I honestly don't see any advantage to LaTeX over html+svg+css+mathml+??? for any usecase. Everything that LaTeX does the things that I mentioned do better.
I love latex for papers, but come on.
What about Web6?
Too early