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Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

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Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#141

Post by whatever1 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #92
whatever1 wrote: post #5

Can’t wait to hardcode styling for each individual display that is out there! go latex! Make everyone miserable, not just the math people.

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 t…

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.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#142

Post by pjmlp »

tekromancr wrote: post #53
linguae wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 usin…

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-...

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#143

Post by teucris »

pharke wrote: post #64
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

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.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#144

Post by Jetrel »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #106
pharke wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#146

Post by charlieyu1 »

jacobmischka wrote: post #3

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.

Is HTML in its best form, no. If people are to recreate HTML in 2021, it would probably be based on JSON.

But HTML is good enough for people to keep using. And LaTeX is barely good enough after four decades for people to keep using.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#147

Post by ttybird »

dredmorbius wrote: post #137
ttybird wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 docume…

To respond to your question: no. Not sure why you linked me the PDF 2 specification. PDF/UA is from 2012, and the ability to tag PDF files for accessibility is a thing since 2001 (with PDF 1.4).

Various tools and packages that attempted to generate accessible pdfs from LaTeX have existed for aeons, all of they had a common characteristic: they sucked. I am convinced that by this point everyone who cares about accessibility has moved to other formats (like HTML).

"HTML does not"

is "first class".

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#148

Post by ttybird »

dredmorbius wrote: post #138
ttybird wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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.

"Note that any data can be transferred over HTTP(S), including, on occasion, either compiled or uncompiled LaTeX."

Sure, but I don't see what this has to do with anything.

As for your perception, I don't care :) Keep it to yourself next time please. You too are being perceived in a certain way as well but telling you how would likely be against this site's rules.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#149

Post by ttybird »

jansommer wrote: post #48
choeger wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? 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 bui…

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.

You are probably looking for Qt.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#150

Post by ttybird »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #103
JasonCannon wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Easier to track you.
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