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

HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)

info.arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 141 posts

Re: HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)

#121

Post by franga2000 »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #76

If the Unicode consortium would spend less time and effort on emoji and more on making the most common/important mathematical symbols and notations available/renderable in plain text, maybe we could move past the (LA)TeX/PDF marriage. OpenType and TrueType now (edit: for well over a decade, actually) support the necessary conditional rendering required to perform complicated rendering operations to get sequences of U…

The whole "we need latex because of math" thing has been nothing more than a bad excuse for a very long time. Math notation is too varied to include in Unicode (some papers have to invent new notation!), but even if we had it, authors would still insist on latex. You can already make responsive and largely accessible papers that render to HTML, with latex familiar syntax for equations, bibtex for references and all the footnotes/figures/tables/captions you might want.

But authors still refuse. It's not real science if the layout isn't two-column, written in an old serif font, tables and figures float randomly disconnected from their reference points, code isn't syntax higlighted and has completely nonsensical line breaks... If the reader wants to read it on a phone, or needs to change to font to be larger or more legible, they're not a real scientist and don't deserve to read real papers.

Seriously, what the fuck?? Even the economists are laughing at us with their MS Word and third-party cloud-based bibliography plugin subscription.

Re: HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)

#122

Post by bruce343434 »

bsder wrote: post #107
crazygringo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand. No matter what fancy things you do with superscripts and subscripts, you're not going to be able to do even basic things you need for equations like use a fraction bar, or parentheses that grow in height to match the content inside them. At a fundamental level, Unicode is for characters, not layout. Unicode may abuse the ZWJ for emoji, but it still ultimately results in a single emoji character, n…

> No matter what fancy things you do with superscripts and subscripts, you're not going to be able to do even basic things you need for equations like use a fraction bar, or parentheses that grow in height to match the content inside them. Why not? Things like Arabic ligatures already do that, no?

Arabic ligatures? Do you mean the unicode point for the basmala for instance? That's pretty "hardcoded", I think math requires more composability

Re: HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)

#123

Post by teddy-smith »

crazygringo wrote: post #111
teddy-smith wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on are you serious? HTML/CSS is more powerful than TEX or PDF. https://csszengarden.com/

Did you fully read my comment? Please point me to where HTML/CSS provide the features I listed. It doesn't really matter if HTML/CSS is more powerful at a hundred other layout things, if it doesn't provide the absolute necessary features for papers.

Citations in various formats,

> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

> https://codepen.io/tag/citation

footnotes

>https://codepen.io/SitePoint/pen/QbMgvY

references to automatically numbered figures and tables

> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25869906/table-auto-numb...\

> https://codepen.io/MikeKelley/pen/GpXmEd

Re: HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)

#124

Post by teddy-smith »

carlosjobim wrote: post #106
teddy-smith wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@media print { .page, .page-break { break-after: page; } }

It doesn't function in real use, it's just theoretical.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...

Literally part of Mozilla's docs.

Re: HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)

#125

Post by teddy-smith »

fsh wrote: post #77
_dain_ wrote: post #67

Wasn't the World Wide Web invented at CERN specifically for sharing scientific papers? Why are we still using PDFs at all?

No, it wasn't. Scientists at CERN used DVI and later PDF like everyone else. HTML has no provisions for typesetting equations and is therefore not suitable for physics papers (without much newer hacks such as MathML).

Why not typeset in something else and import the image into html/css?

Re: HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)

#126

Post by silon42 »

pspeter3 wrote: post #56
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #50

I wish epub was more common for papers. I have no idea if there's any real difficulties with that, or just not enough demand.

Why epub? Isn’t it just HTML under the hood?

I think it should also have JS disabled (I hope!)

Re: HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)

#127

Post by cluckindan »

o11c wrote: post #113
cluckindan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML alone is in fact not a format for displaying/rendering. Done properly, it is a structural representation of the content. (This is often called ”semantic HTML”.) They are converting to HTML to make the content more accessible. Accessibility in this context means a11y, in effect ”more accessible” equates to ”more compatible with screen readers”. While PDF documents can be made accessible, it is way easier to do it…

The hope for semantic HTML died the day they said "stop using , use ", regardless of what the actual purpose of the italics was (it's usually not emphasis).

Who said that? The semantics are different.

The HTML element represents a range of text that is set off from the normal text for some reason, such as idiomatic text, technical terms, taxonomical designations, among others. Historically, these have been presented using italicized type, which is the original source of the naming of this element.

The element is for words that have a stressed emphasis compared to surrounding text, which is often limited to a word or words of a sentence and affects the meaning of the sentence itself.

Typically this element is displayed in italic type. However, it should not be used to apply italic styling; use the CSS font-style property for that purpose. Use the element to mark the title of a work (book, play, song, etc.). Use the element to mark text that is in an alternate tone or mood, which covers many common situations for italics such as scientific names or words in other languages.

Re: HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)

#128

Post by istillwritecode »

dginev wrote: post #95

Hi, an arXiv HTML Papers developer here. As a very brief update - we are pending a larger update. You will spot many (many) issues with our current coverage and fidelity of the paper rendering. When they jump at you, please report them to us. All reports from the last 2 years have landed on github. We have made a bit of progress since, but there are (a lot of) more low-hanging fruit to pick. Project issues: https://g…

I would like to write code for latexml to translate a package but I found the documentation to be hard to understand. That might be what is holding developers back. I looked at this a year ago and gave up.

Re: HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)

#129

Post by gus_massa »

franga2000 wrote: post #121
ComputerGuru wrote: post #76

If the Unicode consortium would spend less time and effort on emoji and more on making the most common/important mathematical symbols and notations available/renderable in plain text, maybe we could move past the (LA)TeX/PDF marriage. OpenType and TrueType now (edit: for well over a decade, actually) support the necessary conditional rendering required to perform complicated rendering operations to get sequences of U…

The whole "we need latex because of math" thing has been nothing more than a bad excuse for a very long time. Math notation is too varied to include in Unicode (some papers have to invent new notation!), but even if we had it, authors would still insist on latex. You can already make responsive and largely accessible papers that render to HTML, with latex familiar syntax for equations, bibtex for references and all t…

Authors just follow any format mandated by the journals.

In unoficial notes for the classes, most authors use single column, and try to remember the magic spell to keep the figures in place. Something like [H!] ???

Also most books are single column.

Post reply on HN