> But it’s old. We need something modern, that represents current ways to make documents from code.
I'd love something newer than TeX/LaTeX. Something with consistency (is it \$CMD{...}, \begin{$CMD}...\end{$CMD} or \{$CMD ...}?), better error messages, more specific and targeted warnings (most hbox-full warnings can be ignored, but many can't!), support for specifying `-Werror` (like gcc) and other things like that.
> I bet within my lifetime most scientific publications will move to a PDF tool that ingests CSS.
Maybe[1]. CSS and HTML needs a lot more functionality though. They have no page counter, no chapter counter, section counters, etc. No river detection, run detection, orphan detection, etc. No automatic reference manager[2], no automatic referencing of chapters, sections, tables, figures, etc. Missing correct hyphenation breakpoints.
Additionally, some things are there, but in a poor (for typesetting) way - inter-paragraph spacing must be faked (no, `:after` isn't a good way to specify `inter` spacing), no way to prevent what should be an atomic element (say ... an mbox containing a paragraph and an image) being broken across pages, no way to float an element to the next point in the document where it will fit (LaTeX does this by default, and it annoyed me no end when I could not find a way to get HTML documents to stop breaking my pretty short table across a page, and instead just place it on the next page).
Another thing that I think are a poor fit, but others think are superior, are the scripting facilities for creating new commands: doing `\newcommand or \newenvironment` is a lot less friction than doing an entire custom element. It's so little friction, that for an invoice I can simply do `\newcommand{\client}{\textbf\emph{The Client PTY LTD}}` and then use `\client` everywhere in the document.
I'm looking forward to a new LaTeX/TeX that fixes all those things. Maybe CSS+HTML would eventually get them, but many of those things are table stakes for typesetting, and yet they are not even on the horizon (or roadmap) for CSS+HTML.
[1] Could be I'm wrong. Like I said in another response, I'm no expert in CSS or HTML.
[1] This can be easily resolved with a custom web component
> And that way is CSS. I bet within my lifetime most scientific publications will move to a PDF tool that ingests CSS. We just need to find something open-source and clean that has no missing functionality.