Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

cynicusrex.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 154 posts

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#61

Post by pharke »

azangru wrote: post #36
swiley wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, HTML would be amazing if people weren't trying to use browsers as application runtime environments.

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.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#62

Post by xaltsc »

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.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#63

Post by bee_rider »

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.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#64

Post by pharke »

teucris wrote: post #56

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. a…

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

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#65

Post by pharke »

nice_byte wrote: post #30

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.

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.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#66

Post by IshKebab »

jklinger410 wrote: post #14
xondono wrote: post #11

> 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…

UBI is unequivocally a good thing.

That is exactly the naive mindset he is talking about.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#67

Post by pharke »

kvark wrote: post #23

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/

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#68

Post by imbnwa »

pharke wrote: post #58
sgillen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#69

Post by ushtaritk421 »

pharke wrote: post #61
azangru wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bet…

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.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#70

Post by blueflow »

leephillips wrote: post #43
blueflow wrote: post #18

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.

Post reply on HN