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> 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
by dnautics 5y 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.
- infogulch 5y agoWhat would sane defaults for css be?
- dnautics 5y agoMaybe I spoke too soon -- Thinking back (and I could be wrong about this) but the "top" of the style sheet cascade is supposed to be defined by the browser? So I guess it's the browers' responsibility? I guess the point I was trying to make is that if you just type only non-layout LaTeX it looks reasonably good, yeah, it does format it with super-wide margins (shrug), but if you do that with html you get mouth spiders.
- dredmorbius 5y agoI'd like to see something far closer to my "Motherfucking Website" variant: https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB There are a few bits of that I'd fiddle with, but the idea of defining margins and avoiding text that runs flush to gutters, as well as defining most of the whitespace in rem & em units rather than pixels or points, is a big part of it. Another alternative would be a stock set of document types for which users could choose from predefined styles. The document would specify the doctype, the user the styling. That could include various branding or simiilar components, but they'd be reasonably minimal. The ever-encroaching headers, footers, sidebars, floating interstitials, etc., of the modern web really need to go DIAF.
- GiovanniP 5y ago> I mean, that already failed for LaTeX. To me it's kind of an unwieldy pile of wierd imperative imports You need to try TeXmacs (which, despite its name, is not based on TeX ;-) ). www.texmacs.org