[HN Gopher] Web4 Should Run on LaTeX
___________________________________________________________________
Web4 Should Run on LaTeX
Author : CynicusRex
Score : 110 points
Date : 2021-11-28 17:11 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cynicusrex.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cynicusrex.com)
| xondono wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| UBI is unequivocally a good thing.
| Ginden wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That is exactly the naive mindset he is talking about.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| 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.
| poetically wrote:
| 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.
| kohlerm wrote:
| Yeah the Latex thingy is a click bait, but otherwise he has some
| good points
| judah wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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."
| dash2 wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
| xaltsc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| blueflow wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Do you know about Pandoc?
| blueflow wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| StringyBob wrote:
| Has anyone written the Web3.0 / Web4.0 TeX2NFT converter yet?
| fghorow wrote:
| Heh.
|
| Talk to Elsevier. I'm sure they'd like another source of
| cashflow.
| smt88 wrote:
| Latex would certainly make it worse. Latex is among the worst
| languages (to use) that I've ever encountered.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Technically TeX is the language. LaTeX is a library of macros
| for TeX, that tries to make it easier to work with TeX.
| alex_young wrote:
| I know not with what technology Web4 will be written, but Web5
| will be written in crayon.
| bflesch wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You mean like Gemini? https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
| leodriesch wrote:
| 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.
| drcursor wrote:
| What about Web6?
| hexman wrote:
| Too early
| [deleted]
| streamofdigits wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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.
| nice_byte wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >"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 wrote:
| i also prefer native apps for doing anything, but the
| collective "we" has already decided otherwise, and there's no
| point fighting that tide.
| pharke wrote:
| 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.
| jacobmischka wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| What do you mean by "runtime compiled", exactly?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| With LaTeX, the document creator _must compile the
| document_ , through a fairly persnickety processor (latex,
| tetex, or an equivalent). Whilst that may still pass
| poorly-structured documents and result in poorly-formed
| output, straight-up illegal syntax won't make.
|
| HTML has no such requirements. There's absolutely nothing
| stopping you from posting that in the first place. Throw
| something at a browser, and it will try its damndest to
| ingest it --- that's the "runtime compiled" element of the
| Web.
|
| (It's not a perfect analogy to software compilation, though
| it can get surprisingly close.)
|
| Essentially: the Web lacks _any_ editor role. That 's long
| been touted as a benefit. At scale, however, and over time
| ... it becomes problematic.
|
| Moreover, the _commercial_ Web has a selection process and
| corresponding evolutionary path which has come to be seen
| as less than optimal for those seeking high-value, high-
| relevance content. It is in fact _hostile_ to such content,
| on multiple bases.
|
| Again, LaTeX alone won't fix these problems. It addresses a
| few issues of structure. The concept of a post-authoring
| compliation state (ironically itself somewhat present in
| many web content-management systems, but not oriented
| around the document or content itself for the most part,
| but rather branding, advertising, and surveillance
| instrumenting) is also somewhat attractive but ...
| problematic. A discovery-mechanism scoring penalty might
| help (and Google's certainly applied that in other areas).
| ttybird wrote:
| "must"? A web4 browser would probably use a "runtime
| compiled" implementation.
|
| "Whilst that may still pass poorly-structured documents
| and result in poorly-formed output" - this by the way
| happens much more often with LaTeX compared to html in my
| experience.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| A LaTeX document is virtually never directly consumed by
| a reader. It's first converted ("compiled") into some
| consumable format. Typically PDF/Postscript, though there
| can be numerous others.
|
| You seem to be unfamiliar with this aspect of the system?
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > Moreover, the commercial Web has a selection process
| and corresponding evolutionary path which has come to be
| seen as less than optimal for those seeking high-value,
| high-relevance content. It is in fact hostile to such
| content, on multiple bases.
|
| That aspect has absolutely nothing to do with the
| technical format of a document.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That's a large part of my larger point. It wasn't,
| however any aspect of the question you'd asked, and I'd
| answered.
|
| That said, and despite some quite strong semantic
| elements to HTML (and HTML5 especially), and the
| semantic/presentation separation of HTML/CSS, what we're
| getting, what seems to be encouraged by, and what the
| adtech-profiting browser vendor and driver of Web browser
| development seem to be encouraging, is not in fact well-
| structured, meaningful, high-value, high-relevance
| documents.
|
| You're absolutely correct that the core of the problem
| isn't the technical format. But the technical format's
| become infected by that core problem.
| freemint wrote:
| 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?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Neither are native first-class elements of plain HTML.
| ttybird wrote:
| Nor a "first-class" TeX element either. \footnote is just
| a macro.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| We're discussing LaTeX.
|
| TeX itself is a set of typesetting primitives. LaTeX is a
| set of structurally-semantic, document-oriented macros
| built on TeX.
| dnautics wrote:
| > 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.
| GiovanniP wrote:
| > 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
| infogulch wrote:
| What would sane defaults for css be?
| dnautics wrote:
| Maybe 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 wrote:
| I'd like to see something far closer to my "Motherfucking
| Website" variant:
|
| 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.
| swiley wrote:
| Exactly, HTML would be amazing if people weren't trying to use
| browsers as application runtime environments.
| linguae wrote:
| 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?
| tekromancr wrote:
| Sure, one /could/ do that. And most web based games do that
| but then you have to re-invent a whole bunch of stuff.
| Scrolling, text layout, accessibility hooks, etc.
| kaba0 wrote:
| That already exists, but it would also mean the end of end-
| user customizations. As mentioned by sibling poster,
| accessibility would be nonexistent, but one also could not
| use adblockers, copy text, etc.
| azangru wrote:
| 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?
| pharke wrote:
| How about write an application specifically designed to
| execute code that you give it in a safe environment. Then
| you only have to make that application crossplatform and
| everyone can target it instead. People write for the
| browser because it is a sandbox, store front, package
| manager, UI kit all rolled into one. If some smart cookie
| decides to forget about the web and build to that spec they
| could come up with a better alternative.
| ushtaritk421 wrote:
| I've thought about this. The thing is that the current
| relevant browser environments (basically Safari, Chrome,
| and Firefox) require, what, a billion dollars a year to
| maintain? 2 billion? And this doesn't even count the
| various JavaScript frameworks, auth systems, CDNs, etc.
|
| Any replacement technology/protocol which does the same
| "write once, use everywhere" thing and manages to perform
| better would still need to achieve wide adoption. And I
| feel like users would still want that to be able to play
| seamlessly with everything in their lives that they have
| online.
| pharke wrote:
| It would certainly be a challenge but there are examples
| of cross platform applications that have succeeded in the
| market. The Godot game engine is a good one since it does
| a similar thing for a different segment of the market.
| It's cross platform and allows you to build applications
| that target those platforms and more (even the web!). So
| these things are within the reach of a small team, or
| even a single dedicated individual. The important thing
| is to focus on what matters. Providing a safe environment
| to run code downloaded from strangers, a set of
| configurable UI elements and an API for making network
| and storage requests. You're basically building a VM with
| a UI kit and some networking. You could probably
| bootstrap up from something simple since it would likely
| be a fun platform to target for hobbyists, if you could
| build a community or scene around it.
| choeger wrote:
| 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.
| sto_hristo wrote:
| Many developers in the industry have simply realized that
| the flexibility of html/css/js is simply unmatched by any
| other technology out there. Nothing else out there has
| been subjected to such extreme levels of scrutiny the web
| has. Nothing. Afaik, even the Dragon capsules use it for
| the UI layer.
|
| But since you're such a boi genius, make something that
| can match and get ahead of it and i'm sure everyone will
| jump on your boat. Until then, your opinion will remain
| objectively useless.
| mempko wrote:
| Pyramids were also built with a lot of effort. But in the
| end it was a pile of stones. Architecture was created
| when labor and material saving technology like the arch
| was invented. We are in the pyramid phase with the web.
| sto_hristo wrote:
| Well since you know what phase we're in, and that we're
| in a phase even, then surely you must know what and when
| the revolution is. So cut the chatter and get us there.
| Why waste time?
| tzs wrote:
| > What's so fucking difficult on either writing a Cross-
| Platform UI or using a Cross-Platform framework?
|
| It's been a long time since I used a cross-platform
| framework so maybe things have gotten better but what
| used to happen was that I'd run across something in them
| that didn't work right and then I'd have to do one of:
|
| 1. Just not use that in my application,
|
| 2. Implement that thing outside the framework which
| required me to (1) know how to do that thing natively and
| (2) figure out how to make my implementation work with
| the rest of the app that was using the framework, or
|
| 3. Figure out how to fix the bug in the framework which
| required me to (1) dive into the framework's internals
| and (2) probably required me to know how to do the thing
| natively.
|
| Framework internals are complicated. This complexity is
| expected--when you are writing a native application you
| only need the complexity that is inherent in doing
| whatever it is that application is doing whereas a
| framework has to be flexible and general enough to serve
| the needs of a wide variety of applications.
|
| If the framework is going to make me dive into its
| internals to get it to work there is a good chance that
| the total effort of making my app run on two or three
| platforms via the framework will be more than writing
| separate native apps for those platforms.
| d3ckard wrote:
| Buzzwords like type system?
| jansommer wrote:
| Please suggest a cross platform framework that doesn't
| come with accessibility issues, that also allows you to
| create as rich ui's like what you can do in a browser,
| and without various licenses that restrict what you can
| do with your code? Something that supports Android, iOS,
| Linux, Windows and MacOS.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I feel that it's cheating here to include android and ios
| in this list, since so much stuff that is developed
| either: * is only for those two (and
| sometimes only one of those) platforms * the
| preferred "version" on those platforms in an app, rather
| than web-based
|
| It's clear from the scope of the mobile app market that
| there's a huge marketplace for a kind of application that
| essentially never existed on desktops. It seems a little
| bold to insist that the same x-platform toolkit must
| service mobile and desktop contexts, when so much is
| different between them, in particular display size and
| interaction style. Even more so when the evidence seems
| to be that not even the web has really managed to do
| this.
| JasonCannon wrote:
| And yet HTML+CSS+JS which is so hated for making
| applications handles the use case of working across
| mobile and desktop almost perfectly. Maybe it's not just
| because we don't want to learn real programming like the
| grandparent post insinuated and instead a perfectly
| viable solution to the problem at hand.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| If it is handled so perfectly by web tech, why do mobile
| apps exist?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Or target the JVM, ship jar files, and solve the problem
| ~25 years ago.
| pharke wrote:
| We need an improvement, not a regression.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Jar files are a single file portable to all major
| platforms (and many minor), that can run offline and have
| entirely acceptable performance with modern versions and
| modern hardware (i.e. slower than C but perfectly good if
| JS in a browser is the comparison). They have inferior
| security vs browser sandboxing but better no worse than a
| native binary. Other than being "old", what exactly is
| the regression?
| thrower123 wrote:
| I wish we still had applets. They sucked on dial-up, but
| that's not really a problem anymore.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| p2p_astroturf wrote:
| Your insane perspective and the fact that it is common, is
| why the internet sucks.
|
| 1. Youtube is just a generic video hoster, of which many
| came before, during, and will come after. As for the whole
| "pretend Youtube is a thing" thing, I can't remember one
| actual good video from a "content creator" ever. It's all
| circle jerking and quick videos on a topic based on least
| effort.
|
| 2. <video> tag has never had a single good implementation.
| They are all bugged and 100x slower/clunkier than using the
| built in menu on a CRT TV from the early 90s.
|
| 3. Yes, the web would be better if it was just static
| content. Even without <video> tag. The primary use of a
| <video> tag is clickbait (actually, almost nobody uses a
| <video> tag because they don't want to host video, and
| instead use a youtube embed, so <video> is not even used in
| practice). For anything else, like movies, porn, etc, it's
| 1000x more convenient to just download the video and watch
| it offline in a real video player like MPV. Web browsers
| still cannot even turn off that stupid "you are now in full
| screen" banner at the top of the screen, which fortifies my
| point that <video> is not good for what it is intended for:
| short one-off clips scattered throughout web pages.
|
| 4. The whole idea that it's hard to have a video tag is a
| product of licesnsing braindamage and the clusterfuck of
| video encoding standards.
|
| 5. The web is not great, and I try to avoid it as much as
| possible. Using a god damn terminal emulator (the most
| braindamaged obsolete shit in the world) is 1000x more
| pleasant than using a web browser.
| sgillen wrote:
| 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).
| pharke wrote:
| 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.
| imbnwa wrote:
| >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).
|
| TBF I don't think the author meant to imply that we should
| "allow everyone to quit their jobs and make art instead".
| If we agree that the article is largely lamenting the
| extortive/exploitative nature of modern society cum digital
| medium than I'd wager what's in mind is UBI as counter-
| balance to the increasingly extortive/exploitative labor
| relations many people are living with. We're sorta getting
| a taste of this with the effect of exceptional unemployment
| benefits but that's temporary.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Can't wait to hardcode styling for each individual display that
| is out there!
|
| go latex! Make everyone miserable, not just the math people.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
| Meandering wrote:
| 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.
| austincheney wrote:
| > How to fix it?
|
| The problem is simple: client/server model
|
| The solution then is to migrate towards an alternative.
| web007 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _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.
| minaguib wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I agree. This will continue to get worse, the general
| quality of search engine results is deteriorating.
| beebeepka wrote:
| 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.
| gxonatano wrote:
| 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/)
| kiryin wrote:
| 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.
| teucris wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| ttybird wrote:
| 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.
| NavinF wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's obviously a joke. He's using hyperbole to make a point.
| kizer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Error messages are like the least horrible wart in LaTeX's
| mile-long list of warts.
| Foivos wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Pyxl101 wrote:
| 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.
| maxerickson wrote:
| It's still SharePoint but simultaneous editing works
| reasonably well (with auto save versioning instead of check
| outs and check ins).
| kamranjon wrote:
| 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
| amichail wrote:
| Try the more friendly WYSIWYG TeXmacs. Its output is comparable
| to TeX/LaTeX.
| amluto wrote:
| Or LyX.
| dangerbird2 wrote:
| 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.
| jokoon wrote:
| 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.
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