Maybe some day for some papers HTML could be the source of truth instead of LaTeX. After all, the original use case for HTML and the web was academics. The HTML

Maybe some day for some papers HTML could be the source of truth instead of LaTeX. After all, the original use case for HTML and the web was academics. The HTML and CSS specs have evolved a lot since then, with support for the typesetting features you need for papers (justified text, hyphenation, page breaks, page numbers, ...) and even math formulas are possible now again natively with MathML thanks to Igalia. Diagrams can be accessible vector SVGs instead of raster images. Referencing, linking, citing, figures, tables, etc have always been native to HTML. It's trivial nowadays too to wrap a headless chromium in a CLI to convert an HTML document to PDF rendered in the exact same way that the browser would (i.e. not some static conversion tool that lags behind standards or has render implementation differences).