PDF fetishism and blindly disliking HTML because it's associated with the current web is such an old trope. HTML and CSS are <i>good</i> 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.<p>No one is making you write web apps, websites are still first class citizens for web browsers.
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.
No, no, no, that's not how Web<number>.0 works! You have to make it <i>worse</i> as the number goes up.<p>Web 2.0 added more interaction, more tracking, and more advertizing.<p>Web 3.0 adds crypto scams.<p>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 <i>have</i> to publish at least 4 websites a year or perish.
> 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<p>This was either written by a 20somethings who wasn’t there in the “good times” he is describing, or by someone who was there but still has the mindset of someone in their 20s.<p>I don’t know which is worse.
No. Tex is procedural. It's an execute-only language, not a declarative one. It would result in documents as rigid as PDF documents.<p>The other direction, constraint-based layout, is more useful. A is above B, C is to the right of D. Put all those into a constraint analyzer and come up with a layout. This is a 2D geometry problem and should be solved graphically, not procedurally. Nobody knew how to write constraint solvers thirty years ago, and they can be compute-intensive, but those are solved problems now.<p>A good example of a system which does this is the 2D sketch system in Autodesk Inventor and Fusion 360. Those are true parametric constraint solving systems. Plus, unlike web systems, they can do curves.
I don't know about Web4 and LaTex specifically but Web5 tech will surely be reverting to communication with mouth sprayed color pigments sketching images on cave rocks.<p>I believe this is just an elaborate complaint: The author simply expresses the disgust that many feel of how the utopic promise of the internet and digital technology more general (as captured, say, in the early TED sessions) has translated into a dystopia that does not seem able to find a bottom.<p>Maybe the promise was fake to start with, maybe mixing a pliable and ultimately "social" technology with a broken economic/political system could never have produced healthy offspring.<p>In any case, we are in a sort of purgatory, waiting for some miracle to absolve people and make them feel good again about their trade.
This, but ironically.<p>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.<p>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.
I see the author's point.<p>However it focuses almost entirely on the idea of documents/information retrieval.<p>The web would not be at today's scale if it focused on written-word documentation. For better or worse, most individuals are spending their time online for entertainment.
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.<p>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. articles as plain html? What if those services then offered web apps to view content and competes to make the best viewers? Could we get back to a content-first model that still encouraged business to flourish?
Surprised not to see a mention of gemini. But ultimately it's the same spirit. It's in the air. Society and economy re-rooted itself over IP (let's find a cute acronym for that). That said I don't see the sad web trend stopping, my bet is that it may very well evolve into ubiquitous world wide allocation web where the network will track and optimize exchanges ala bitcoin/ethereum (don't jump on me yet, I'm not promoting crypto.. but I think they're a hint of how information and physical systems will intertwine).
<i>I mainly want to communicate by text</i><p>The web is no longer about communicating, especially the parts the author complains about (framework-driven apps, JavaScript, social networks, etc). It's about working, creating, and broadcasting to large groups. That's not <i>necessarily</i> a bad thing (although if you write a blog no doubt it feels a bit bad having to fight for attention with tweets and stuff).<p>The very simple fact is that the web has changed. It's not a place where people publish text articles for their audience to read any more. It's a distribution platform for users to create things with rich, diverse apps. There are a ton of problems with it (privacy, security, ownership, sharing, etc), but none of them will be fixed by moving to a different technology. The problems the web has are people problems, not tech problems.
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.<p>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.
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.
I wrote a little R package to write tables. I knew what HTML tables and Word tables could do. I wrote the interface to use all those features. LaTeX nerds were super proud of their tables. Should be easy to reimplement the features in TeX, right?<p><a href="https://github.com/hughjonesd/huxtable/blob/master/R/latex.R" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hughjonesd/huxtable/blob/master/R/latex.R</a><p>TeX is an abomination from hell.
This is not constructive in my opinion. Some people say that the web was better in its early days when there was just HTML. HTML or LaTex, which the author recommends, may be sufficient for documents, but if you want that kind of an experience you can just use reader mode.<p>But opening an interactive prototype in Figma just by clicking a link or planning an event with Doodle just by clicking a link is not something I’d want to miss out on just to remove ads and cookie banners from websites. Sure loading speed would also be increased, but internet connections are getting faster and faster and most western countries have quite good coverage of fast networks.<p>The author also states that he/she doesn’t want to learn new web tech all the time, while server rendered PHP still works and powers a large portion of the internet. The web platform also doesn’t really have breaking changes, so your past knowledge still applies and old pages continue to work.<p>To me this is just an overreaction that doesn’t consider lots of usecases for the web.
I agree with everything but the latex part. Something like HTML 3.2 is a better fit for hypertext documents. There's no need to re-invent anything, only remove the feature creep and cancerous bullshit.<p>That's easier said than done though, with everyone so invested in this modern game of "emperor's new clothes" that is the modern web.
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.<p>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..
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.<p>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.
Must watch: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4dYwEyjZcY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4dYwEyjZcY</a><p>The problem with HTML is the dom and all the clutter around it. It's not really readable, and require browsers to take decisions for ambiguous markup, which involves bloat.
> Plain text as much as possible suffices for most websites; content and speed over style.<p>I generally agree with this - many websites are insanely over complicated. I should need to download react/angular/<popular JS framework>, load some JSON files, download a 100 MB title background image - just to read some text.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>> Reddit should copy Hacker News<p>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.<p>> billionaires should pay their goddamn taxes so we can implement Universal Basic Income<p>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.<p>I do except that something needs to be done to address increasing wealth inequality, but it should be a self-sustaining system.
The author's argument is essentially,<p>> Billionaires should pay their taxes so we can finance giving everyone basic income, creators won't have to monetize the web, and humanity can live in peace.<p>Ah, what remarkably wishful naivete. There are so many faulty assumptions in that premise.<p>It assumes billionaires paying taxes would finance universal basic income. It would not.<p>It assumes there will always be billionaires to tax. But if we remove competitive incentives, there may well be few or no billionaires. (It's a testament to capitalism that it has not only raised myriads out of poverty, but also created legions of super wealthy.)<p>It assumes people who receive universal basic income will "no longer be pitted against each other." But competition will always exist; it's intrinsic to nature itself.<p>The author assumes people will be more virtuous if only we didn't have to work for a living. This is not true. Humans are terrible, and most of us are not bright creative luminaries who'd spend our time in productive or creative pursuits. Rather, most of us are lazy and selfish by nature at best, self-destructive at worst.<p>It assumes UBI would create peace for humanity. This is not true. Fighting, competition, and resource claiming is intrinsic to nature.<p>In short, this article has a clickbait headline -- it really has little to do with LaTeX -- and a remarkably naive conclusion.
I think PDF should be replaced with some SVG-based document format. HTMLs inability to model the concept of "pages" is something I'm missing from current web. Also, a LaTeX-style document creation language rendering into SVG would be really cool.
Most of the people in this thread are taking the article too seriously. It's obviously using hyperbole to make a point about how most web development is driven by fashion trends instead of fundamentals.
Unless you're the kind of person to print out physical copies of web pages (and I suspect OP may be one of these people), there's no reason to use LaTeX.<p>Pagination is for paper, not screens. Thus, PDFs, LaTex, and companions, have no place on the Web. [I wrote about this recently here.](<a href="https://jonreeve.com/2021/05/stop-making-pdfs/" rel="nofollow">https://jonreeve.com/2021/05/stop-making-pdfs/</a>)
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).<p>Sadly, nobody else was interested, and they probably still won't be. One difference? in 2021, I agree with them.
I would be much more likely to believe the author if they didn't embed multiple videos in their screed against multimedia.<p>You can provide a plaintext experience if you think it's better, but clearly you don't.
I honestly don't see any advantage to LaTeX over html+svg+css+mathml+??? for any usecase. Everything that LaTeX does the things that I mentioned do better.