Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/web4.html

by CynicusRex • 5 years ago

132 151 5 years ago

cynicusrex.com

drcursor• 5 years ago

What about Web6?

hexman• 5 years ago

Too early

jacobmischka• 5 years ago

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.

swiley• 5 years ago

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

azangru• 5 years ago

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?

linguae• 5 years ago

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 using HTML+CSS+JavaScript, we use tools inspired by desktop GUI development tools that render to a WebGL canvas and compile to Webassembly?

rchaud2• 5 years ago

So we shouldn't have had Youtube, Vimeo etc. until W3C got around to making <video> 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.

sgillen• 5 years ago

Well the article title is clickbait, the author wants the web to move to plaintext, but doesn’t actually seem to suggest moving away from plain html and css.

(Still a bit silly though since the author does mention latex as an alternative too).

pharke7• 5 years ago

The only useful part of the article was the holding up of two example websites. If the whole article had been an informative survey of websites done right, it would have been a much more worthwhile read. The problem of monetization through serving ads that the author points out won't be solved by reverting to HTML only or even to text only. If a website costs money to host or create content for then it must generate revenue to pay the bills unless the author has other means of doing so. Making websites smaller will reduce those costs but won't eliminate them.

UBI is a non-answer to this, implementing it won't allow everyone to quit their jobs and make art instead. Ideally it's meant to be a social safety net, not a way to sponge off of "billionaires paying their taxes" and no ideal survives contact with implementation. We could hope for a marginal improvement on welfare at best (and that would be a good thing, even small improvements count).

The current web can and should be improved upon. Web browsers are in a "worst (that works) is best" situation after having roughly solved the software distribution problem. We need to take these lessons and move on to something better. Seamless execution of software in a sandboxed environment. That's how you solve the current state of the web, build something that is better suited to what people are trying to shoehorn into browsers and they will move all of their bloated apps off of the web leaving only pristine documents behind.

dredmorbius15• 5 years ago

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 minutes after such a proposal actually hit the Web.

The underlying failure of HTML is that it is runtime compiled, not precompiled. This makes things far easier on authors and publishers, and far worse for readers. In the early days, the former mattered in order to incentivise content. Last I checked, incentivising content is no longer the Web's principle problem.

I've also been leaning toward LaTeX as a document speification language for hypertext systems, though I don't believe that alone is sufficient to fix the Web's ills.

DaiPlusPlus2• 5 years ago

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

zozbot234• 5 years ago

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

dnautics2• 5 years ago

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.

freemint2• 5 years ago

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?

charlieyu1• 5 years ago

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.

whatever12• 5 years ago

Can’t wait to hardcode styling for each individual display that is out there!

go latex! Make everyone miserable, not just the math people.

Meandering• 5 years ago

This was my first counterargument to his post. Latex can be used to make amazing documents but, it is a pain in the ass to learn. If they simplified latex in a similar vain to HTML2 -> HTML5, then it starts to look reasonable.

I think his frustration is misplaced on the medium of content. He is addressing the same issue everyone else has, the fragmentation of information. The internet isn't a one stop shop anymore. You are forced to cycle through huge amounts of reposts and micro-posts to get anything useful.

dredmorbius15• 5 years ago

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 the EinkBro web browser for anything over a page or two in length simply because I can page through that rather than deal with the fussiness of scrolling.

Once you reach a sufficiently large display, physical pragmatics come to the fore. We've settled on books that are mostly 8--14" or so diagonal measure because that's what's convenient to hold and read. There are smaller and larger exceptions (pocketbooks and other miniatures, coffee-table books and atlases), but those are 1) less convenient and 2) clear compromises between format, material, ease of reading, and other factors.

For a sufficiently-large desktop display, a standard quarto/folio print format displayed 2-up is usually preferable. Scaling from that or presenting 1-up is really the desktop / window manager's problem.

ttybird14• 5 years ago

"e.g., ePub"

So, at the end you are going to serve html at the browser.

You can do that with web1

freemint2• 5 years ago

Yeah ebooks made from Latex look horrible to me. Worse then HTML documents. But it is ok for preferences to differ.

whatever12• 5 years ago

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.

minaguib• 5 years ago

I see the author's point.

However it focuses almost entirely on the idea of documents/information retrieval.

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.

poetically4• 5 years ago

Which is probably why most of the web now consists of SEO optimized entertainment that some people take way too seriously, e.g. conspiracy theories.

rchaud2• 5 years ago

One of the worst ones is "[famous person's] net worth". People take the Google-provided snippet (sourced from some garbage website) at face value.

NavinF• 5 years ago

I was certain the title was a joke. After reading the article, I’ll continue to assume this is an elaborate joke for the sake of my sanity.

poetically4• 5 years ago

It's obviously a joke. He's using hyperbole to make a point.

kizer• 5 years ago

That's what everyone is missing. It's just to make a point... but people are taking it literally. He means "back to the basics"; e.g., plain text.

It's a good title because I laughed when I read it and it made me want to read the article.

agumonkey• 5 years ago

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).

marcus_cemes• 5 years ago

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.

moffkalast• 5 years ago

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 execution is a resounding meh.

otabdeveloper4• 5 years ago

Error messages are like the least horrible wart in LaTeX's mile-long list of warts.

Foivos• 5 years ago

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.

rowanG077• 5 years ago

I have the complete opposite experience. I used word for years and years. I started studying a bit later in life and learned latex first when I was 27. I was flabbergasted that it was not the default tool in the business world. Now I'd rather take an ice bath then write a larger document in word.

I still really disagree with the poster though. Latex is not a good fit for Web pages.

kamranjon• 5 years ago

The article actually says latex is not a good fit for the web, but the philosophy behind it is what they think should be adopted

Pyxl101• 5 years ago

What’s wrong with Word? Modern businesses are turning increasingly to document formats like Google Docs and Quip in my experience: online editing solutions where documents are stored online and are as easy to share at any stage in their lifecycle as sharing a hyperlink.

Quip has extremely basic editing features, to the extent that I sometimes find it stifling. However, it does a great job at providing 95% of what most business documents need: several headings sizes, paragraphs, numbered and bulleted lists, and the ability to embed pictures - with great collaboration tools.

Quip as a medium is like Hacker News comments. You don’t have a lot of formatting options to work with so you focus on the content rather than messing about with styling.

Most business documents are written and read in a short period of time. Both of the tools show you who from your organization is reading the document for collaborative reviews and allow people to add comments on content inline. Google Documents allows people to make suggested changes that the author/editor can review and accept, incorporating the edit into the document; or the author can share the document and allow people to make changes to it directly.

For example, when my team is having planning meetings, or we are reviewing a project plan, etc. the primary author will often project/screenshare the document, while everyone else also loads it on their computer. We can each see where everyone else’s cursor is (or highlights) and all edit the document simultaneously (if the author wishes) or leave feedback/suggest edits - that we can all see.

These kinds of features matter more in a business environment in my experience more than the ability to format documents in complex ways.

Personally, I find Quip too simplistic, because it does not handle things well like having multiple paragraphs plus a code block in a numbered list item. Google Documents can also have issues with things like this, but I rarely run into something crucial that I cannot do. (But it does have missing features: for example there is no way to add line numbers to a document — but these are less important now that the convention is for everyone to review the document on their computer simultaneously, rather than printing them out).

I find Word to be the most powerful of all of these editing tools and have the easiest time getting it to do what I want. However, (at least the versions I’ve used) seems geared around writing and saving documents locally. It would be my choice of tool if I had to write a long business document and Google Docs wasn’t fitting the bill.

There’s probably a way to set up collaboration features with Word like with the other tools these days, but the “best” collaboration I’ve seen has been through SharePoint which was painful: people had to “check out” the document in order to make changes, etc. I imagine that with Office 365 Microsoft has something better now but if they do I have not had a chance to use it.

Quip and Google Docs “just work”. They are web applications so there is no difference in what is supported between OS versions like with the Word.

In my career as a software engineer & businessperson I’ve rarely needed more than these types of basic text editing tools to collaborate with and convey ideas to my colleagues. Making collaboration simple, including the ability to simultaneously edit a document, or enabling people to read a document at their leisure (asynchronously), and add comments/suggestions/edits - which always refer to the authoritative latest copy (none of this monkey business with emailing around copies of Word documents) provides far more value than advanced editing features would.

If a person can’t get their point across easily using Word’s defaults, perhaps customized a bit by choosing their preferred font, including diagrams where necessary, then I’d question whether the difficulty is the editing tool or something else.

Unless you are producing specialized documents such as academic research intended for publication, or legal documents intended for submission to a court, etc., in my experience business documents rarely need more formatting than Markdown can produce; and easy real-time collaboration is a massive value add.

amichail• 5 years ago

Try the more friendly WYSIWYG TeXmacs. Its output is comparable to TeX/LaTeX.

amluto• 5 years ago

Or LyX.

dangerbird2• 5 years ago

I had great luck using pandoc instead of raw LaTeX. I'd just write the manuscript body in markdown, and use inline LaTeX for layouts and more complex figures that can't be replicated in Markdown. it also outputs .docx in case the prof wanted Word docs submitted digitally.

xondono• 5 years ago

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

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.

I don’t know which is worse.

jklinger4102• 5 years ago

UBI is unequivocally a good thing.

Ginden• 5 years ago

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...

IshKebab• 5 years ago

That is exactly the naive mindset he is talking about.

bitcharmer• 5 years ago

My thoughts exactly. Clickbaity title and clearly no substance. In my experience there is a strong negative correlation between the confidence and young age. A little disappointing this made it to the front page.

dash2• 5 years ago

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?

https://github.com/hughjonesd/huxtable/blob/master/R/latex.R

TeX is an abomination from hell.

blueflow2• 5 years ago

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.

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..

leephillips• 5 years ago

Do you know about Pandoc?

blueflow2• 5 years ago

Yes. Pandoc just got disabled (due to build failure) from my Linux distribution because the Haskell/GHC ecosystem is unhandy.

Maybe AWK is an ugly language, but its an on-board tool on all systems im using. In terms of getting it to run its superior to Haskell.

jl6• 5 years ago

No, no, no, that's not how Web<number>.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.

smt88• 5 years ago

Latex would certainly make it worse. Latex is among the worst languages (to use) that I've ever encountered.

ithkuil• 5 years ago

Technically TeX is the language. LaTeX is a library of macros for TeX, that tries to make it easier to work with TeX.

StringyBob• 5 years ago

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

fghorow• 5 years ago

Heh.

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

bflesch2• 5 years ago

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.

josefx• 5 years ago

I would be fine if I could somehow generate an index for print. CSS kind of supports it, but that is only implemented by a few proprietary tools (yay web "standards").

bflesch2• 5 years ago

Fully agree. And nowadays the HTML -> Print workflow is also used for generation of PDF or ebooks and it is extremely hacky. There should be more standard way to do it.

kvark2• 5 years ago

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.

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.

pharke7• 5 years ago

You mean like Gemini? https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

kvark2• 5 years ago

I definitely need to check it out. Thanks for the link!

streamofdigits• 5 years ago

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.

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.

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.

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.

nice_byte2• 5 years ago

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.

FpUser2• 5 years ago

"we want cross-platform, sandboxed applications with instantaneous delivery"

My version of "we" wants:

a) Plain websites that are just documents with links and navigation.

b) Yes browser based applications please.

c) Yes native apps please as the browser is severely restricted (and for good reasons) on what it allows those apps to do.

Each part is equally important to "we"

nice_byte2• 5 years ago

i also prefer native apps for doing anything, but the collective "we" has already decided otherwise, and there's no point fighting that tide.

pharke7• 5 years ago

Yes. Browsers are great at presenting beautiful webpages, the best compliment to that would be an application that opens when you click on "try our app", downloads a nice compressed binary, and executes it in a sandboxed environment that works on every platform. Maybe that can be successfully built into browsers but I believe it could be better done as a separate project with a fresh start.

austincheney• 5 years ago

How to fix it?

The problem is simple: client/server model

The solution then is to migrate towards an alternative.

beebeepka• 5 years ago

Pretty decent rant. I share some of the pain as laid out in the article.

As a long time troll myself, I think the whe LaTeX is just a vehicle.

kiryin• 5 years ago

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.

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.

jokoon• 5 years ago

Must watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4dYwEyjZcY

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.

judah• 5 years ago

The author's argument is essentially,

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.

Ah, what remarkably wishful naivete. There are so many faulty assumptions in that premise.

It assumes billionaires paying taxes would finance universal basic income. It would not.

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.)

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.

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.

It assumes UBI would create peace for humanity. This is not true. Fighting, competition, and resource claiming is intrinsic to nature.

In short, this article has a clickbait headline -- it really has little to do with LaTeX -- and a remarkably naive conclusion.

fwip• 5 years ago

You seem to believe that billionaires have each added billions of dollars of value to humanity.

Rather, most of us are lazy and selfish by nature at best, self-destructive at worst.

"Speak for yourself."

alex_young• 5 years ago

I know not with what technology Web4 will be written, but Web5 will be written in crayon.

poetically4• 5 years ago

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.

teucris2• 5 years ago

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. 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?

pharke7• 5 years ago

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

teucris2• 5 years ago

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.

xaltsc• 5 years ago

This, but ironically.

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.

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.

bee_rider• 5 years ago

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.

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.

PaulDavisThe1st3• 5 years ago

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.

web007• 5 years ago

I would be much more likely to believe the author if they didn't embed multiple videos in their screed against multimedia.

You can provide a plaintext experience if you think it's better, but clearly you don't.

onion2k• 5 years ago

I mainly want to communicate by text

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 necessarily 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).

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.

gxonatano• 5 years ago

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.

Pagination is for paper, not screens. Thus, PDFs, LaTex, and companions, have no place on the Web. [I wrote about this recently here.](https://jonreeve.com/2021/05/stop-making-pdfs/)

Animats• 5 years ago

No. Tex is procedural. It's an execute-only language, not a declarative one. It would result in documents as rigid as PDF documents.

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.

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.

leodriesch• 5 years ago

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.

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.

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.

To me this is just an overreaction that doesn’t consider lots of usecases for the web.

ttybird14• 5 years ago

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.

kohlerm• 5 years ago

Yeah the Latex thingy is a click bait, but otherwise he has some good points

garbagecoder2• 5 years ago

I love latex for papers, but come on.

gbraad• 5 years ago

Latex and JS, latex for webapps, hahaha. Checks calendar.

bArray• 5 years ago

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/<popular JS framework>, 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.

Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

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