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Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

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Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#71

Post by mempko »

sto_hristo wrote: post #54
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…

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.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#72

Post by fghorow »

StringyBob wrote: post #59
jl6 wrote: post #19

No, no, no, that's not how Web .0 works! You have to make it worse as the number goes up. Web 2.0 added more interaction, more tracking, and more advertizing. Web 3.0 adds crypto scams. If Web 4.0 is going anywhere near LaTeX, it needs to add not just the typesetting language, but also the whole system of peer-reviewed academic publishing, and you have to publish at least 4 websites a year or perish.

Has anyone written the Web3.0 / Web4.0 TeX2NFT converter yet?

Heh.

Talk to Elsevier. I'm sure they'd like another source of cashflow.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#73

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

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?

Or target the JVM, ship jar files, and solve the problem ~25 years ago.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#74

Post by Foivos »

moffkalast wrote: post #12
marcus_cemes wrote: post #9

I've used LaTeX for the duration of my Bachlor studies. The results are superior to Word, but that's just about where the benefits end. It's a nightmare to use and I don't see how investing time to learn it will benefit me in the long run.

Yeah LaTeX needs some actually useful error messages first before it can be considered for something that people use widely. It's crash logs are even less useful than C++ and that's saying something. You basically have to do guesswork to figure out what might be wrong if the damn thing won't compile. My BSc thesis wasn't the first thing I wrote in it, but it likely will be the last one. The idea is good, the executio…

If you use overleaf, after compilation, they parse the log file and try to give you better guesses of what each error message is. Also, if you click on an error they redirect you to a help page with what you can do about it.

Hopefully, whatever they do can be intergraded to offline latex tools like latexmk.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#75

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

dredmorbius wrote: post #60
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.

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…

What do you mean by “runtime compiled”, exactly?

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#76

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

In 1994, while working at UWashington CS&E, I hacked up NCSA Mosaic to render LaTeX (with href's). It was quite good (british quite or US quite is left for the reader).

Sadly, nobody else was interested, and they probably still won't be. One difference? in 2021, I agree with them.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#77

Post by rchaud »

swiley wrote: post #24
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.

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

So we shouldn't have had Youtube, Vimeo etc. until W3C got around to making part of the official spec in 2010?

The web is great because people kept pushing its limits and weren't arbitrarily held back by bureaucrats. Even though Apple and Google have spent untold billions to push the "there's an app for that" line of thinking, the web has survived.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#78

Post by zozbot234 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #60
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.

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…

Footnotes and sidenotes can be realized as elements and styled/scripted to appear as actual footnotes on print media. Formulas are supported via MathML.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#79

Post by dnautics »

dredmorbius wrote: post #60
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.

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…

> 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 minutes after such a proposal actually hit the Web.

I mean, that already failed for LaTeX. To me it's kind of an unwieldy pile of wierd imperative imports. I did write my thesis in it, but for the most part it was "smash these imports together, pray for the best, if it doesn't work, try a different collection of imports, don't bother trying to fix your imports, settle for "least bad" -- which, of course, was better than MS word". I used to do my resumes too, with the same spray and pray feel. Now I just write a markdown file, and anyone that cares that the resume is poorly formatted I probably don't care to work for (many places sanitize resumes to a single format anyways, i suppose for non-discrimination purposes).

Honestly, even though I myself can't use CSS effectively, what little bit I can use feels like CSS is converging to that declarative-layout-that-is-separate-from-document-contents philosophy that LaTeX tried to do, with the major distinguishing point that LaTeX had a huge "start with sane defaults" selling point, and CSS most definitely does not start with sane defaults.

Re: Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

#80

Post by tzs »

choeger wrote: post #46
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?

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…

> What's so fucking difficult on either writing a Cross-Platform UI or using a Cross-Platform framework?

It's been a long time since I used a cross-platform framework so maybe things have gotten better but what used to happen was that I'd run across something in them that didn't work right and then I'd have to do one of:

1. Just not use that in my application,

2. Implement that thing outside the framework which required me to (1) know how to do that thing natively and (2) figure out how to make my implementation work with the rest of the app that was using the framework, or

3. Figure out how to fix the bug in the framework which required me to (1) dive into the framework's internals and (2) probably required me to know how to do the thing natively.

Framework internals are complicated. This complexity is expected--when you are writing a native application you only need the complexity that is inherent in doing whatever it is that application is doing whereas a framework has to be flexible and general enough to serve the needs of a wide variety of applications.

If the framework is going to make me dive into its internals to get it to work there is a good chance that the total effort of making my app run on two or three platforms via the framework will be more than writing separate native apps for those platforms.

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