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Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

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Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#121

Post by wudangmonk »

mempko wrote: post #71
sto_hristo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#122

Post by bArray »

> 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/, 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.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#123

Post by tasogare »

dredmorbius wrote: post #110
ttybird wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#124

Post by tasogare »

garbagecoder wrote: post #117
dredmorbius wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#125

Post by mgalgs »

Ginden wrote: post #45
jklinger410 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#126

Post by dredmorbius »

freemint wrote: post #91
dredmorbius wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

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

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#127

Post by dredmorbius »

tasogare wrote: post #124
garbagecoder wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#128

Post by dredmorbius »

tasogare wrote: post #123
dredmorbius wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#129

Post by ttybird »

dredmorbius wrote: post #115
ttybird wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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)

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#130

Post by ttybird »

tasogare wrote: post #124
garbagecoder wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Username checks out? Are people who compile markdown, org (or even LaTeX) via pandoc into html somehow "garbage coders"?
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