25 ms·

Web4 Should Run on LaTeX

132 points by CynicusRex 5y ago

kiryin 5y 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.
NavinF 5y 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.
- poetically 5y ago
  It's obviously a joke. He's using hyperbole to make a point.
  - kizer 5y 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.
drcursor 5y ago
What about Web6?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hexman 5y ago
  Too early
jacobmischka 5y 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 5y ago
  Exactly, HTML would be amazing if people weren't trying to use browsers as application runtime environments.
  - azangru 5y 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?
    - choeger 5y ago
      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? <rant> 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 building websites and they don't want to put up the effort to understand what a type system is? Is it not true that the same developers pull in dependencies reflexivly and never consider long-term maintenance, let alone such weird concepts like supply chain security? And finally did not some hip leaders invent the microservice architecture to cater to these idiots? Because it's nowadays simpler to have a huge, inefficient, pile of services that hides all complexity in the communication between these services than to have one well-designed, efficient system? </rant> Sorry for the rant, but sometimes I feel like the industry is actually regressing because many developers are simply lazy morons that hide behind buzzwords.
whatever1 5y 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 5y 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.
- dredmorbius 5y 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.
  - freemint 5y ago
    Yeah ebooks made from Latex look horrible to me. Worse then HTML documents. But it is ok for preferences to differ.
minaguib 5y 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.
- poetically 5y 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.
  - rchaud 5y 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.
    - poetically 5y ago
      I agree. This will continue to get worse, the general quality of search engine results is deteriorating.
agumonkey 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
    Error messages are like the least horrible wart in LaTeX's mile-long list of warts.
  - Foivos 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
xondono 5y 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.
- jklinger410 5y ago
  UBI is unequivocally a good thing.
  - Ginden 5y 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+divided+by+population+of+usa https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4+trillion+dollars+div...
    - mgalgs 5y ago
      Side note: Wolfram Alpha is just the best
  - IshKebab 5y ago
    That is exactly the naive mindset he is talking about.
    - jklinger410 5y ago
      Yeah, and he's wrong.
- bitcharmer 5y 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 5y 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 https://github.com/hughjonesd/huxtable/blob/master/R/latex.R TeX is an abomination from hell.
blueflow 5y 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 5y ago
  Do you know about Pandoc?
  - blueflow 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
  Latex would certainly make it worse. Latex is among the worst languages (to use) that I've ever encountered.
  - ithkuil 5y 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 5y ago
  Has anyone written the Web3.0 / Web4.0 TeX2NFT converter yet?
  - fghorow 5y ago
    Heh. Talk to Elsevier. I'm sure they'd like another source of cashflow.
bflesch 5y 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 5y 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").
  - bflesch 5y 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.
kvark 5y 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.
- pharke 5y ago
  You mean like Gemini? https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
  - kvark 5y ago
    I definitely need to check it out. Thanks for the link!
streamofdigits 5y 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_byte 5y 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.
- FpUser 5y 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_byte 5y 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.
    - FpUser 5y ago
      >"collective "we" has already decided otherwise" It has not. Many native applications are doing just fine. I have one native desktop based as a product with about 40,000 customers and is growing. The fact that 90% are doing A does not mean that the rest 10% doing B are unprofitable or less important. "Niche" markets (I could hardly call native apps niche yet) can be very attractive.
- pharke 5y 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 5y ago
> How to fix it? The problem is simple: client/server model The solution then is to migrate towards an alternative.
beebeepka 5y 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.
jokoon 5y ago
Must watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4dYwEyjZcY 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
I know not with what technology Web4 will be written, but Web5 will be written in crayon.
poetically 5y 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.
teucris 5y 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?
- pharke 5y 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 https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange
  - teucris 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y 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.
gxonatano 5y 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/ https://jonreeve.com/2021/05/stop-making-pdfs/)
web007 5y 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 5y 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.
Animats 5y 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 5y 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.
ttybird 5y 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 5y ago
Yeah the Latex thingy is a click bait, but otherwise he has some good points
garbagecoder 5y ago
I love latex for papers, but come on.
gbraad 5y ago
Latex and JS, latex for webapps, hahaha. Checks calendar.
bArray 5y 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.

132 points by CynicusRex 5y 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.

NavinF 5y 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.

poetically 5y ago
It's obviously a joke. He's using hyperbole to make a point.
- kizer 5y 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.

drcursor 5y ago

What about Web6?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hexman 5y ago
Too early

jacobmischka 5y 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 5y ago
Exactly, HTML would be amazing if people weren't trying to use browsers as application runtime environments.
- azangru 5y 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?
  - choeger 5y ago
    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? <rant> 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 building websites and they don't want to put up the effort to understand what a type system is? Is it not true that the same developers pull in dependencies reflexivly and never consider long-term maintenance, let alone such weird concepts like supply chain security? And finally did not some hip leaders invent the microservice architecture to cater to these idiots? Because it's nowadays simpler to have a huge, inefficient, pile of services that hides all complexity in the communication between these services than to have one well-designed, efficient system? </rant> Sorry for the rant, but sometimes I feel like the industry is actually regressing because many developers are simply lazy morons that hide behind buzzwords.

whatever1 5y 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 5y 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.
dredmorbius 5y 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.
- freemint 5y ago
  Yeah ebooks made from Latex look horrible to me. Worse then HTML documents. But it is ok for preferences to differ.

minaguib 5y 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.

poetically 5y 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.
- rchaud 5y 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.
  - poetically 5y ago
    I agree. This will continue to get worse, the general quality of search engine results is deteriorating.

agumonkey 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
  Error messages are like the least horrible wart in LaTeX's mile-long list of warts.
- Foivos 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago

xondono 5y 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.

jklinger410 5y ago
UBI is unequivocally a good thing.
- Ginden 5y 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+divided+by+population+of+usa https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4+trillion+dollars+div...
  - mgalgs 5y ago
    Side note: Wolfram Alpha is just the best
- IshKebab 5y ago
  That is exactly the naive mindset he is talking about.
  - jklinger410 5y ago
    Yeah, and he's wrong.
bitcharmer 5y 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 5y 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 https://github.com/hughjonesd/huxtable/blob/master/R/latex.R TeX is an abomination from hell.

blueflow 5y 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 5y ago
Do you know about Pandoc?
- blueflow 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
Latex would certainly make it worse. Latex is among the worst languages (to use) that I've ever encountered.
- ithkuil 5y 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 5y ago
Has anyone written the Web3.0 / Web4.0 TeX2NFT converter yet?
- fghorow 5y ago
  Heh. Talk to Elsevier. I'm sure they'd like another source of cashflow.

bflesch 5y 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 5y 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").
- bflesch 5y 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.

kvark 5y 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.

pharke 5y ago
You mean like Gemini? https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
- kvark 5y ago
  I definitely need to check it out. Thanks for the link!

streamofdigits 5y 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_byte 5y 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.

FpUser 5y 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_byte 5y 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.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    >"collective "we" has already decided otherwise" It has not. Many native applications are doing just fine. I have one native desktop based as a product with about 40,000 customers and is growing. The fact that 90% are doing A does not mean that the rest 10% doing B are unprofitable or less important. "Niche" markets (I could hardly call native apps niche yet) can be very attractive.
pharke 5y 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 5y ago

> How to fix it? The problem is simple: client/server model The solution then is to migrate towards an alternative.

beebeepka 5y 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.

jokoon 5y ago

Must watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4dYwEyjZcY 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago

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

poetically 5y 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.

teucris 5y 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?

pharke 5y 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 https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange
- teucris 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y 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.

gxonatano 5y 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/ https://jonreeve.com/2021/05/stop-making-pdfs/)

web007 5y 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 5y 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.

Animats 5y 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 5y 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.

ttybird 5y 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 5y ago

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

garbagecoder 5y ago

I love latex for papers, but come on.

gbraad 5y ago

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

bArray 5y 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.