Slashdot Mirror
Could LaTeX Replace HTML?
Acheon asks: "I recently learned to use LaTeX recently and I wondered why it couldn't be turned into the next standard for online documents. After all, most features of LaTeX make it either easier or more powerful than HTML, such as pagination (pure HTML 4.0 is a nightmare to code by hand) and scientific notation. It is much more suited for scripting, much more standard and readable, as well as more versatile. Also, HTML to LaTeX transcription is already feasible, so the only big feature missing for LaTeX to be supported in browsers would be linking, perhaps object embedding. On the other hand I don't know of any project going into that direction, what is most of a surprise to me given the huge interest for LaTeX and the omnipresence of such documents in many areas."
Sheesh, old fucks these days. They see people at Best Buy purchasing 100-Base-T hubs and they start rambling thicknet trivia as if they still matter.
Shouldn't you be off somewhere fixing a 4 mA current loop interface? You smell of teletype oil, dude.
Nowhere, NA (12/04/00) In a press release today, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced a startling discovery -- That a bowl of cold macaroni and cheese can simulate the experiences of the Web. "It's amazing," said Tim Berners-Lee, renowned invertor of the Web and founder of W3C. "I never even thought about this. All that time and energy lost, when I could have just went down to the local store and bought a cheap package of macaroni and cheese." While there have been no plans announced for moving the World Wide Web to macaroni and cheese-based servers, it is now known that anyone can experience the excitement of this technological marvel with little effort. . .
This combined with the fact that most nifty LaTeX features lie in user extensions (inclusion of pictures etc) make it harder to use LaTeX for a web point of view (You don't want your browser to be complex enough to "run" programs, the browsers are too unstable and too slow already).
LaTeX is great for writing documents and I use it almost daily, but when it comes to web pages, well, I am not so sure...
Those who use wysiwyg (pronounced wussy-wig)
editors exclusively have failed to see the importance of logical layout vs. physical layout.
With LaTeX you worry about the content of your document and you let LaTeX worry about physical layout. Usually, LaTeX does the right thing and I only have to perform a few tweaks at the end.
Also, its trivial to radically change the physical layout of LaTeX output.
The real question, when using HTML, how much do you care about physical layout from the beginning?
LaTeX is so bloody complicated that a simple window resize would necessitate re-compiling the document. It is, after all, meant for typesetting, so the letter and symbol spacing have to be precise. There are no PostScript web pages for similar reasons.
All you ignoramuses clearly don't know what LaTeX is all about. It's 100% about logical document content, not formatting. The TeX underlying cares about formatting, but LaTeX only knows about logical document compoentns.
It'd be ideal for the web (since HTML was supposed to be about structure, not layout), but it's too late for that now.
The purely internal TeX commands which handle only these items are an excellent abstraction of the typesetting problems with an incredibly powerful way of expressing things out of very few elements, concepts and built-in rules. The macros of plain TeX, which build on top of this limited set of hardwired elements are on the other hand somewhat cumbersome (and somewhat limitd by the internal language in which I would like to see a more programmer friendly interface).
Harder? Depends what you're doing. Personally, I like being able to write the bulk of my text in LaTeX without tags, whereas in HTML I have to punctuate every paragraph with <p> tags.
I really wish they didn't name XML during the hypestorm of HTML. I mean, was XML really designed to be an eXtensible Markup Language? XML is almost never used to markup anything; it seems more of a structured data transfer language. I don't care if the book has a red cover and some dorky looking "guru" on the cover, XML is not just "a better HTML".
</soapbox>
\begin{document}
\catcode`\@=0
@textbf{Now `at' is also a command character}
\catcode`\a=12
will make a a non-letter character
Basically, you need a markup language that can't redefine itself as it goes along. LaTeX can redefine itself, and would need to be completely rewritten in order to work without it (and probably would need to be seperated from TeX, at which point, XML seems like a wise choice)
John
John_Chalisque
Well, they don't own HTML either, yet they produce the best (fastest, most robust, best looking, most popular) HTML application. What's your point?
Use dvipdfm ( http://gaspra.kettering.edu/dvipdfm/ ).
/.
/mill
Funny topic this when 99% of the participants don't know anything what they are talking about. Oh well, that's
LaTeX is a bit tricky, because several layers of description are all implemented in the same language. Thus, the LaTeX document you write is actually calling a complex set of TeX macros, which actually get down to the level of deciding what characters go where. This means that there's no particular reason you can't mix the levels, and include in your document something that totally screws up the process.
.dvi). I'm not sure it would replace HTML, but it could certainly replace ps/pdf (the document format which accurately represents a bad photocopy of your document).
On the other hand, there's a significant subset of LaTeX which is purely semantic (which is why it beats Word, for instance-- you don't have to deal with the layout yourself). This could form a standard document language if it were precisely determined.
Such a setup would probably work well for most applications: the actual layout macros would be internal to the browser, so the document would come out nicely anywhere; the browser could fetch the embedded images (the main problem with distributing
How can you call it a proprietarised PS? The standard is published and Adobe doesn't try to make it hard for 3rd parties to implement viewers and writers.
I have created a couple of slide presentations in LaTeX. From the one LaTeX file comes overhead foils, handouts and HTML. What does PPT look like when you generate HTML(I assume you can)? The space saving per slide is significant too methinks.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
Because in LaTeX you normally do define the document in terms of it's structure (/section{Introduction}) and then redefine what /section{Introduction} means in terms of dots on paper, I would expect it to be easier if anything.
;<br><br>.
CSS is available enough now that HTML 'designers' just might start doing that more, using <h1 class="SectionHeading"> rather than <font size=6 color="Purple" face="Arial">Introduction</font><br>
That said, while the default style of LaTeX is fairly attractive, it's pretty tricky to get out of - which annoys those with intact vision.
(season comments to taste - I haven't used LaTeX since about 1992, when Latex2e was just arriving, and I gave up Physics - I believe 2e sorted out a lot of problems with controlling the look, including sensible PS font support)
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
I have played with LaTeX and would agree it is very powerful... However if you believe the 'future technologists' we are all heading toward XML anyhow.
:)
As we all know we don't always end up with the best standard, and it's very hard to introduce new standards (Beta vs. VHS?). LaTeX has a lot going for it, but HTML has the biggest thing of all - Billions of webpages already out there.
Given the trouble browser makers seem to have with meeting the current standards I am not sure I would like to see them tackle two standards.
And besides, I already know HTML inside out, I don't want to have to learn another markup
(If I typed faster, this would be a first post)
... unlike the number of Word-generated pages which are appalling.
LaTeX is the dog's for print documents, tables of contents, headings, indexing and the rest. Worry about the content, let the package worry about the look on the page.
--
"I do not speak for my employers, though they are controlled from my Teddy's huge pulsating brain."
I'm sorry, but PlanetFrontPage is a registered trademark of GameSpy Industries, and we are going to have to ask you to stop using our trademark or face the wrath of our trained attack dogs.
Thank you for your time.
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake..
Perhaps easier to _parse_, but since when did parsing become the problem here? Knuth himself has said (in an interview a couple of months ago, it was even referred to here on Slashdot) that he didn't see TeX (and thus not LaTeX either) as a good solution for the web. TeX/LaTeX simply isn't made to cope with incremental rendering, user interaction, page/screen width changing all the time, etc.. Plus the whole thing is incredibly more complicated (at least syntax-wise) than HTML -- as somebody here pointed out, you can wildly redefine macros and do all sorts of weird stuff ;-)
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
Yeah, the fact that TeX (and therfore LaTeX) is Turing complete makes it a PITA for many document description purposes. PostScript has the same problem too.
Of course, HTML has this problem too, thanks to embedded scripting. How do you write a program which analyses a web page and determines whether it has any pop-ups? You can't, because it's equivalent to solving the halting problem. (note that having the brwser simply ignore requests to open new windows is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about analysing a page without executing the content. After all, the content might not ever terminate). A restricted subset of HTML that lacks <SCRIPT> and the ONWHATEVER attributes can be analysed for the most part though.
HTML has another advantage over LaTeX: it's a hell of a lot easier to parse. It's even easier to make an XHTML parser.
Huh? Token Ring vs. Ethernet only makes a difference for your local segment of LAN, and represents only the lowest layer of the protocol stack, the PHY (Physical) layer. You still get TCP and IP layered over that if you wish. You're only going to run Token Ring to a router or thereabouts.
Sheesh. Kids these days. They type "winipcfg" and they think they know networking.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Program Intellivision!
Hehehehe! :-) Thanks for the
chuckle. 'Course, I'm only 25.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Program Intellivision!
As I recall, the bug-bounty doubled with each verified bug, and as each bug is fixed, the version number of TeX approaches Pi.
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
what planet are you from? planet FrontPage?
Probably. The planet which prefers kilobytes of java (fphover) to a one-line onmouseover statement, never sets the page's background colour, and whose server extensions are (1) huge; (2) incredibly insecure; and (3) a rectal pain to install correctly? Been there, planted a flag, never going back.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
There are plenty of PS pages, but it's likely that your (Windows based?) web browser isn't set up to display them, or is too thick to display them.
Also, PDF is essentially a proprietarised PS; think ``I am viewing a PostScript page'' next time you click on a link ending ``.pdf'' and you'll eventually pick the idea up. Bzip2'ed PS (document.ps.bz2) generally does much better than PDF spacewise, too.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
On the contrary, one often needs to specify hard numbers, since percentages can't be used (iirc)
A LaTeX document doesn't say anything about display sizes, page sizes, font sizes or any of that ugly shit.
Actually, I believe the \documentclass directive specifies a certain paper size. True, you don't hard code it through the document, but it is there, and TeX needs to use this information to determine (for example) where to break lines.
But the big problem with latex as a replacement for html is that there's no sgml/xml-like generalisation of it.
Granted, you don't get fine control over the separator lines between cells, but the idea is there.
In addition, there is a math markup language extension for HTML (Mozilla supports this, the exact name escapes me right now). I haven't tried it, I don't believe Netscape 4.x supports it, but there are plugins. So, if you want those features from HTML, they're there.
I do agree, however, that there is no one-to-one coorespondence between tags or even functionality between the two systems, and the only conversion programs that can realistically be written are going to miss a lot and will produce documents that need serious help. :)
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
Rather, I would ask the other way around: When will there be a usable XML alternative to latex?
LaTeX is bound by numerous fundamental problem. Tecnically, it's multi-pass requirements make it slow and inefficient, and from a usability perspective, it lacks a lot of functionality that is trivial in html.
For example, tables in latex are wimpy compared to those in html: Giving columns and rows in a mixture of fixed width and relative width is easy in html, and impossible in latex. Try making a table in latex that has one left-aligned column, and two other paragraph columns which divide the remaining space 60%-40%. (paragraph columns require a fixed size, so this can't be done, or it needs to be done by eye, which reminds me of word-perfect like tabs for layout).
But the biggest problem is its macro-based nature. If your begin{section} end{section} tags are not well nested... the program cannot warn you abouyt this, but rather is likely to generate confusingly incorrect output or crash with and error message at a seemingly random point later in the file (I have done this several times). XML is much easier to parse and much, much easier to extend.
But let's not forget that XML is really about a logical tree structure - not really about the actual markup. If you think that certain types of documents would benefit from the (non-negligible) effort of a different markup, you can certainly define a serialization of the XML data in non-standard (for example, latex-like) form.
XML is often called a subset of SGML - but its actually a lot more than that because of its information structure.
Latex was nice while it lasted - but time for change has certainly come.
HTML was designed to be reasonably easy for non-hackers to use, and this has been part of its success. Although it's a lot more powerful, Latex would be harder for the average non-technical computer user to use.
XML already fills the void that Latex could have filled; i.e., a language that can simultaneously encode page-layout and page-meaning in an separable and intelligible way. At this point there is really no motivation to change that.
Wander around and you'll find a number of long-forgotten webpages that were originally written in LaTeX and then converted to HTML, as if somehow it was easier that way... -lx
Latex is a typesetting language. HTML is a markup language. HTML, in its pure form, is supposed to seperate presentation from content. Latex does has the content and the presentation intertwined.
All markup will be in a character set represented 60 bit Babylonian positional/grouping numeration. No alphabetic values allowed. Files are to be stored on metal sheets, and written on with blood. transport of the files will be via semafore, with bonobo chimpanzees with flags in hands and feet as routers. Layout information will be not only mixed in with the data, it will be encoded with rot13, with the data in rot8, to aid in insanity of web developer.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
XML gives you your polygons (scalable vector graphics), text and points to other data. Stylesheets determine layout. You can have a different set of styles for diferent devices (web, pda, mp3 players). ECMA-262 Hooked on top a custom DOM will give you client side programming for whatever you may need it for, and if you need something more hefty, tell the DTD to use shockwave or something when it sees that datatype. All the associated files generated here can also be the output of java servelet apps or some other form of app server, so that's a pretty powerful widget that does even more than what you asked for, and is production guy friendly to some extent. If you'd like to help speed it along:
http://www.w3.org/XML/
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
LaTeX pretty much has the same philosophy as HTML that make it bad as language to closely control layout.
I used to use LaTeX really well (haven't used it in a while). LaTeX features can be divided into two groups: layout commands and document structure features.
The layout commands (leave a medium sized space here; put a small space in between lines and a bigger space in between paragraphs) are:
1. pretty specific to print documents and
2. available in the TeX language on which LaTeX is built.
The document features{\begin{description} ; \subsection} are really what LaTeX brings to the table. These allow you write your document without worrying specifically about what it will look like.
You don't care that your section header is 15 pt and your subsection header is 13 pt. You let latex handle that for you. See the first or second chapter of Lamport's book to see the value of doing a logical markup of your language.
Note that html as originally conceived is exactly like that. In your document you have tiers of sections. You don't worry about how they will be rendered. You let the browser worry about that. Excellent latex2html filters have been around a long time. It's an obvious and simple translation. The logical structure match up very well for the most part.
This is it's so hard to get html documents to look exactly like you want. The use of html in most "polished" pages is a triumph of perversity.
Now, TeX really allows you some nice control over layout but it's too complicated to use as a base for a web browers. In fact it's a Turing complete language. I know someone who implemented a BASIC interpreter in TeX.
HTML and LaTeX were both designed as logical formatting languages. HTML has been twisted into doing lots of physical layout and it's awful at it.
Doing real controlled layout will take a completely new ML (probably XML based). I don't know if there's anything in the works.
The Math Maestro Tutoring Services in Seattle
Second of all: I understand perfectly well what TeX is all about, and you are proving my point for me. 95% of the bigots on Slashdot recommend TeX not because it is a tool well suited to the task at hand (hint: it usually isn't), but because it is a complex, inscrutable, unfriendly, overly complex tool that makes them feel elite.
And, let's take a look at your message to me -- why look, it's elitism in action! I'm a lawyer, therefore I couldn't possibly understand abstraction or what a decent tool does? Wrong. In addition to being a lawyer, I'm a system administrator, systems programmer, and engineer. As such, I'm well aware that there are always two tools for every job: the right one, and all of the wrong ones. For most text processing jobs, TeX is all of the wrong ones.
Do some people need it? Sure! If you're writing your thesis, I will not get on your case for using it. In fact, I won't get on your case for using it at all. What I'll get in your face about is your recommending it to poor innocent civilians who just want to get work done instead of learning yet another obscure language.
I don't agree with your apparent assumption that the worth of a text processing system can be measured in terms of how difficult it is to learn and use. I'm sure TeX and LaTeX are "incredibly easy" once you've done an unreasonable amount of work (such as working though all the examples in the TeXbook). No doubt, raising my own cattle would be "incredibly easy" if I would only spend several years apprenticing on a cattle ranch; but if my goal is to just eat a goddamned steak, then I am better off going to the store and buying one. Complain about MS-Word as much as you like (and I do, often). There are plenty of things wrong with it. But if you want to argue that it is harder to use and get productive work done with than LaTex, don't: you are utterly, completely, and didactically wrong.
Does TeX know more about typography than me? Maybe. And perhaps that's the point. Not everyone needs a typesetter. Hell, I'll go further: so few people in the universe need a typesetter that the number is practically negligable, and frankly those that do need it have more powerful, flexible, and easier-to-use tools than TeX. Recommending TeX as a word processor or page layout tool is akin to recommending a shotgun to someone that needs a butter knife. It won't work, it'll make a big fucking mess, and the person will probably hurt themselves in the process.
Well, well, well. Go to bed one evening and the world turns upside down. It looks like themestream censored my article and threatened to pull it just because there were a few choice words in it. Of course, they didn't bother to tell me what, specifically, was wrong with it. What does slashdot think? Should I stop writing for them? I have redacted the "offensive" (dear Themestream: You are all a bunch of assraping pigfuckers) article, and added a link to the original, uncensored version there.
Fortunately, you don't have to pay money to visit the web site with my article. You click on the link, and then you get to read the whole article, and you pay no money. Just like Slashdot
So what, exactly, is the problem? Are you upset that I wasn't adding more noise into the "signal" that is the slashdot comments page? A community that comes up with brilliant genius ideas like "Hey, guys, let's replace HTML with LaTeX?"
A brief excerpt:
"TeX (and it's idiot bastard progeny, LaTeX) are a prime example of all that is kludgy, evil and stupid about the Unix world. Its vices include: a poisoned and brain damaged idea of what proper typesetting should be, a fascist attitude towards letting you (god forbid) do anything actually useful without throwing your keyboard across the room several times in disgust, a simply grotesque and repulsive default "typeface," and a complete mishandling of what writing on a computer is all about."
Every couple of years there are a few people that write me mail telling me why I'm wrong, even though I'm not. Then there are a few people that get the joke, and see that I am handing down divinely-inspired wisdom.
Which are you? Read the whole article and decide for yourself. But remember: every time you recommend that someone use LaTeX instead of HTML, or some other program actually designed to get work done, the baby Jesus cries. Yes, there are a few mathemeticians that actually need to use TeX for its formula support. But you know what? You are not one of them.
From the ends of the earth, this is PeterB, signing off.
That's not the only problem. LaTeX is not
convinient for precise layout. It was meant
for scientific articles where structure of the
document is laid out in advance. But try
getting two images to be rendered next to
each other with pixel precision and you run into
a wall as this is contrary to how LaTeX -> dvi -> ps
scheme works.
So you're saying it'd be easy to /. in LaTeX. Even image next
code
to other image is hard because it'll
depend on your margins. Forget image
within image, a newbie will have a hard
time having an image fit in a double-
column format without screwing up alignment.
Everyone, including writers of LaTeX
manuals, agrees that LaTeX is not a page
layout tool, it is best for cases where
your document fits a prebuilt template,
e.g. for scientific atricles.
Remember that HTML has been designed to render
well on any size screen. LaTeX has a page size
spec as part of your document. To make a TeX
renderer for arbitrary size display would be
hard.
Last but not least, LaTeX has no bindings for
an interactive scripting language, so Java and
ECMAscript would be tough.
Excuse my interjection, but since when is HTML hard?
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
Ah, it brings back fond memories of when I "discovered" TeX and LaTeX... Lo' all those years ago. Yes, coding in LaTeX fired me up with the kind of terminal enthusiasm demonstrated by this ask/.er.
Please note that LaTeX grew out of Tex, Donald Knuth's baby. The source is available, and there is a reward for finding any bug in it!
God... my English has gone to hell...
Here's another one: PDFTeX
I use [La]TeXPDF all the time to create slide presentations without having to use PowerPoint. Plus, it comes with the teTeX distribution.
Linking is already there:
blah blah blah \ref{LABEL} blah blah blah.
You just need a browser that makes \ref{LABEL} a link to where ever in the document.
Labels not in the current document (URLs) would take you there instead.
This seems to me like it would be going the wrong way.
Where are the damn moderator points when I need them?
I reckon you've got it exactly right; what's needed on the web in order for it to continue to expand usefully is for it to be indexable. There's no point in being able to look at a page exactly as the author intended if you can't find the damn thing in the first place.
Whatever format eventually replaces html, it's got to have at its core an indexing system. And pretty though latex is, it's not (AFAIR) that.
Well, yes except I don't know why we need XML as an intermediate.
LaTeX shifts my mother-fucking figures in an immensely stupid order
This is called "arranging," and is done in the most efficient (from a document layout point of view) way.
--AP
Here is a starter page on one method to produce PDFs - http://zandtwerk.insead.fr/tex2pdf.html
However, I don't see this happening. The reason for that is inertia. People like HTML. People know HTML. Web browsers support it. People hate change.
As good as a technology might be, it won't win out over inertia unless it's INCREDIBLY better than the current standard. And maybe not then.
--
Matthew Walker
My DNA is Y2K compliant
Matthew Walker
http://www.tweeterdiet.com/ - My Diet Tracking Tool
Thanks for mentioning HyperTeX, it was the first thing I thought of after reading the subject. I believe HyperTeX has been around since '94 (certainly '95). So if there were any chance of LaTeX replacing HTML it would have happened long ago.
ah well.. wonder what the web would be like today had TeX prevailed, probably a lot smaller, perhaps we would have lost XML too.
Well, I don't know about the person you responded to, but finding documents in PDF form bugs me. I find, more often than not, that I want to edit the document. To accomplish this, I have to copy'n'paste from the PDF to a word processor and hope I don't lose too much of the formatting.
Plus I hate it that a whole new window has to open up to display PDF's in Netscape.
My mind works like lightning. One brilliant flash and it is gone.
Hmmm... I stand corrected. Couldn't find a reference for the doubling, but it does sound a very Knuth thing to do.
Wierd, though - I swear the bounty used to be $3.14. Maybe I'm just getting it confused with the version number...
Russ %-)
... and never, ever play leapfrog with a unicorn.
Yes indeed. Note that I don't think much of HTML as a document description language either. :)
--
Some keywords for the NSA in the Lord of the Rings universe: One Ring bind find Sauron quest Nazgul freedom
Most LaTeX developers are more interested in creating an XML frontend for LaTeX. LaTeX would then serve as a formatting engine for XML-structured documents.
d e2 .html
d e4 .html
LaTeX is primarily a typeseting engine. It does
not have a parser but is compiled like code. A public XML frontend would be useful because, with a parser, it makes it easier and faster to find errors without running the LaTeX compile cycle.
For more on the interaction of LaTeX and SGML, see
http://www.latex-project.org/guides/ltx3info/no
and especially
http://www.latex-project.org/guides/ltx3info/no
Samawi
A more fundamental difference lies in the fact that TeX is a language that's turing complete. It can (will) be uggly, but you can do it in TeX.
Because HTML was never designed for page layout. It is a highly stripped version of SGML, which is probably too complex for a reasonable page markup language without a tool to assist in keeping the tags straight.
There are several formats which seem to serve the same purpose: Troff (The UNIX classic), TeX (The Knuth "hobby" turned golden. LaTex an extention), and lout (from the land down under.)
Any of these, with required extentions can represent a document with sufficient detail to track both the document structure and the document look. For that matter, so can MS Word or Framemaker.
Cheers
This is a boring sig
hey. i've made an online reference manager for research groups who want to share references. it exports int bibtex format-the format latex uses. it's done in php and stores the information in postgresql.
anyone interested check it out here:
rmdb.webpipe.net
email me and i'll give you an account so you can mess around with it.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
XHTML is nice, but if things go properly, you will likely see certain communities of websites with their own DTDs, stylesheets, and XML markups. The reason is simple, the needs of the News websites is different than the needs of a commerce website is different from the needs of a literary website is different from the needs of a physics website, etc.
/IMG tag following a block of text, it is therefore an empty tag) require a "/" at the end to denote they are indeed empty tags.
Much like where LaTeX has a variety of templates for different types of documents, XML will have many DTDs for different types of document structures.
The difference is, and this is key, XML does the job better now (although lacking robust display applications) than LaTeX does.
Sure, you can use a wrench as a hammer. You're going to bend a few nails and probably smash a thumb. Even if your careful, the time it takes to pound some nails is wasteful if you have a hammer within your reach.
XHTML has just a few differences. It is a reformating of HTML 4 so that it is XML compliant. So empty tags such as the IMG tag (there is no
i.e. <IMG SRC="foo.jpg" ALT="bar"> in HTML 4 becomes <IMG SRC="foo.jpd" ALT="bar"/> in XHTML. Notice the addition of the "/" in the XHTML. There are minor differences. But XHTML is not supposed to vary greatly from HTML4, it is HTML4, just represented in XML compliant syntax.
The Apache XML project has FOP, which translates XSL:FO to PDF.
Please don't confuse TeX and LaTeX. The former deals with display elements, while the latter focuses on logical markup (and can conceivably use a backend other than TeX).
Example: $3+4i$ is a complex number in TeX. In MathML, 3 tags with moderately long (4-char, iirc) names are needed to typeset it (one to start the complex number, one to separate the real an complex parts, one to end the complex number).
If you are just interested in web publishing of your work, by all means use MathML, but if you want to produce printed output as well, you will likely be better off with LaTeX. Note also that generating LaTeX from MathML and vice-versa is one of the goals of the MathML project, so you may want to look at both and use the one that "feels" more comfortable.
So don't use LaTeX unless you need the features it provides...
You are wrong. I am in fact one of the mathematicians you refer to who needs LaTeX for its formula support.
Except LaTeX allows macro definitions and has a syntax that is not nearly as wordy as MathML.
Don't get me wrong, I love LaTex. I wrote my thesis in it in emacs. Still, once HTML came along it was immediately obvious that this was a more accessible language for the general public. People went from TeX/LaTeX to HTML in an afternoon. Going the other way would be tough.
Also, a big strength of HTML is that it's not a rigorous language. Most pages contain egregious errors which does not prevent them from being rendered (roughly correctly). As a concept I inifinitely prefer LaTeX, but it's a pain to actually do stuff in.
The first analogy that springs to mind would be replacing perl code with compiled C for system admin tasks. Sure, you can do it and there are some benefits, but who would?
I drag my LaTex environment around with me from system to system but in day to day use - I'll use HTML or a word processor for 95% of my work.
I had the slashdot main page open already, so I thought I'd try it. Here's what I came up with (not a perfect match, but close enough to show it can be done):
LaTeX file., The package with the incomprehesible bits, All needed files in tar.gz, The postscript output (gzipped)
It would require literally weeks of dedicated LaTeX hacking, and the result would be a horrific kludge.
Closer to a few hours. And I wouldn't call it a horrific kludge... I'm sure it would take some time to recreate the slashdot page in HTML as well.
You can set up quite complicated layouts with proper use of the TeX \hbox and \vbox primitives. Then you just need to visualize your layout as boxes in boxes in boxes in boxes in boxes, etc. (Of course I'm not advocating replacing HTML with LaTeX, I just took exception to the statement that it was "for all practical purposes impossible" to do something as complicated as the slashdot homepage in LaTeX.)
TechExplorer explorer also provides the beginnings of MathML support. Waiting for MathML is pretty much why I haven't learned LaTex.
I used Linux as my desktop (well, laptop really) for about six months recently, and this is how I wrote documents after I gave up on StarOffice for being too flipping slow on a PIII-500 with 128 MB RAM. I used KLyx to write documents, with Gimp and Dia providing graphic support, then printed to postscript and used ps2pdf before mailing. Came out perfect every time, and no one could edit the files but me (usually a bad thing but in this case a good thing).
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
I have thought for a long time that Framemaker format would be a good web language. You could
have precise pixel level positioning where you want it, as well as flowed page layout and higher level tagging like HTML. If you want to lay out
an HTML document, just make it a single flowed frame.
Reason: Because it hasn't! I mean, c'mon -- if latex could replace HTML, why would HTML have been invented already? Hasn't latex been around a whole heck of a lot longer? C'mon.
Next: will IPX replace IPv6?
A: No. ;)
-Omar
And is readily configurable (place HERE vs at top of next page vs on a separate figures page). It does a damn good job with the crap that most people feed it (notably figs sized so that nothing can really be put on the same page in a reasonable manner). Still, this argument is irrelevant to the question of whether LaTeX is a suitable markup language for HTML-type documents, as there is no page-oriented-ness in the latter; your complaint is an abberation of the physical page and not relevant to this discussion. Indeed, when you take one of those problematical LaTeX figs and LaTeX2HTML-ize it, the latter is often much nicer.
Guess what? You have to "compile" HTML too! It's just that your browser does this on the fly for you. Now, with pdflatex (a great tool ... now if they could just get psfigs in there :-( ) we are one step closer to the same in the TeX world. The concept of writing a text file that gets interpreted in some manner, whether by a browser or a compiler or an interpreter, should not be a serious conceptual problem.
It is commonly held that a necessary condition for a technical paper to be seriously considered as a work of scholarly merit is that the author has prepared it with a member of the TeX family. Accordingly, when these same respectable people want to take a LaTeX document and publish it on the web, they often turn to LaTeX2HTML.
LaTeX and HTML are very similar: they are both logical markup languages; they both use plain text as their underlying format; etc. HTML has the obvious link capability; LaTeX has the TeX-ability of doing physical layout on the page. Links can be an extension of TeX via \special tags (I believe L2H allows this).
Neither LaTeX nor TeX are page definition methods, as was incorrectly mentioned by someone else -- that is PostScript's (and pdf's) job -- though TeX is closer to this.
wrong... because there are any number of ways that a program can or can't terminate. it involves looping etc.
you can simple scan an html document for "= new Window(" and assume that the page wants to, at some point, generate a popup.<BR><BR>
while this isn't exactly the Turing problem, for all practical purposes, it will tell you whether or not you're going to get hit with a popup.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Boo hoo... so the web isn't what it was in 1991. As a web designer, I personally really like control over presentation and formatting. And given the option of looking at either the mostly redundant but at least semi-attractive corporate web of today or a gray background, black text, bordered images, corporate web (the web will still be largely corporate no matter how you format it) then i'll take the evil misuse of HTML for document control any day.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
But did you gain anything from it? I really doubt it.
The only real benefit of XHTML is support for XML parsers and namespaces.
That means an XML parser can read XHTML, and XHTML can have other types of XML inside of it.
Right now it is not that useful. I am sure it will be in the future.
EverCode
I would just like to add to this:
The overall goal of using XML is to separate content from presentation as much as possible.
There are two types of stylesheets: CSS and XSL.
Right now you can use both of these in IE5 and Mozilla, with XSLT support in a special M18 release build.
EverCode
<b><Abe Simpson></b>
Hmmm... Latex Condo. Boy, I'd sure like to live in one of those!
Unix is mysterious, and ancient, and strong. It's made of cast iron and the bones of heroic programmers of old -
No it wasn't. Unfortunately, 99% of web designers don't know that. I have a big suspicion that most of them don't even know what HTML even is. If these guys want to be taken seriously by developers, then they need to start holding html code reviews, logging bugs and defects against their design, and instituting the bare minimums of software engineering.
I happen to know a few web designers, and discussions I have had with them have led me to this conclusion: it's not so much that they don't know what HTML is supposed to be; that's not even relevant.
Reality is that there are lots of people who don't want to use content-based markup -- they want full control over the layout. They know (from experience, if nothing else) HTML doesn't offer that (and, insofar it does, it does so completely different and the different platforms). Therefore the web designers I know try to use HTML only when they really need to, and use Flash for everything else. It gives them complete control over the layout, it handles interactivity, it is uniformly supported on a whole range of platforms.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
I don't know the full story on wether Flash is open or closed, but I do know that the file format is available for everybody interested. Everyone can make applications that export Flash, and everyone can make Flash players. Even Adobe, Macromedia's most important concurrent, has a Flash editor. I don't know if we need much more openness(sp?) than that.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
And now HTML to LaTeX because going to replace it you want to do the same. Basically you can map most of the presentation commands, and LaTeX can do much more, but many things that make the web unique simply cannot be done: - (not easy, unless you include postscript) - \table (okay!) - ??...> - ??
<FORM> - ??
<LAYER>
<MULTICOLUMN> -- (Easy in LaTeX!)
BACKGROUNDS/COLORS/IMAGES - Absent (ever tried coloring a cell, a full page or half a page in a LaTeX doc?)
<A ...> - Absent
<MAP> - See <A ...>
<OBJECT> - Absent...
So, there are some similarities, but I would say man of the above tags are absolutely needed to make a proper web page...
Common sense is not so common - Voltaire
I wasn't really referring to LaTeX... I used TeX and LaTeX six or seven years ago. What I meant by next gen was next gen for the web... focus now on content delivery; focus next on giving more control on formatting.
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from (to quote a professor of mine).
/. question, i ask this...why bother? Latex is a bit more difficult to learn (at least to me), and we'd probably just run into the same problems we have now with HTML. Imagine MS Latex Explorer, with its own Neat Stuff(tm) propritary addins. I think it'd just be pointless to switch all the content already out there to just repeat the same problems.
Anyway, VRLM is all but dead, i've never heard of XSL, or XLT, XML has nothing to do with document layout, and DHTML and CSS work together to make creating a standard looking document easier.
As to the original Ask
Yeah, I'd also call a decades-old tool like LaTeX "next generation".
Why does the windows crowd insist on ignoring computing's history?
PARC, ArpaNet, C, TeX, Unix, and Englebart.
Let's forget them: Apple invented the GUI, Java was the first portable language, Quark created desktop publishing, Microsoft brings you a stable OS, and video conferencing is still years away. Let's all ignore the last thirty years.
Hell, I'm starting to think I could be a millionaire by digging up research projects from the 60s and 70s and giving them a new coat a paint.
Ok, what about an XML solution for the tasks that LaTeX and the rest of the TeX system handle?
I write all my papers in LaTeX now, and I would rather write documentation and everything else in it. Latex just feels better. (heh) But its not searchable (as far as I know) and I just dont see it as The Way of the Future (TWOTF). Is there an XML system that would combine the benifits of LaTeX with the benefits of XML?
80% of the userbase of Microsoft Word will be on their knees worshiping whoever replaces their bloated, broken, confusing, "word processor" with LyX.
VOS/Interreality project: www.interreality.org
Been done: PassiveTeX
"What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death."
The only problem I really see with redoing everything in LaTex is its lack of linking and embedding. That is why it cannot be done. We need those. It is the Web for a reason..because of Hyperlinks(the "Hyper" part in Hypertext). Without liking, the web would be a lonely place. No slashdot(since it needs links), no linked websites. Just plain old boring, 1 page deals, or ones that have links you have to type in. That is bad. And, without embeding, you lose flash. Flash is your friend. Besides, xhtml is looking pretty nice...Just plain old HTML reimplemented in XML instead of SGML. And, it can be extended.
-------------
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
This page: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.ht ml seems to disagree with you on that count. It's buried pretty deep, so here it is: "If you do succeed in finding a previously undiscovered bug in the programs for either TeX or METAFONT, I shall gladly pay you a reward of $327.68." As I recall, this was originally supposed to double every year - I don't recall where it was the last time I saw him make that claim, so I can't say whether it continues to do so.
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
Amen, brother!!! Someone please mod this up.
Your link is messed, it should be http://www.geocities.com/villageid1ot/
** Sig-a-licious **
Incidentally, IBM's techexplorer is a plug-in to Navigator and IE to display LaTeX documents. You can find it here.
Barney
I hope LaTex does replace HTML for one important reason: inbuilt support for LaTex is a really good argument I like to use when I'm explaining to an addled vi user why Emacs is better ;)
Ahhh, holy wars, how I love thee. A great way to break up a boring meeting...
Cheers,
SuperG
That's the best way to do static documents of large size, in my opinion. Tutorials and books on the web, that sort of thing.
If you use a system such as doxygen to automatically generate documentation from code, then LaTeX is nice as an intermediate output because you can make a web page as well as nice printed output.
So I aggree with you that browsers should not be interpreting or compiling LaTeX; that doesn't mean that you have to refrain from using it when it might happen to be the best tool, however, just translate the LaTeX to HTML when you are done.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
LaTeX discourages layout commands. If you have specific layout needs, you write a style file that describes it; your document should only have semantic commands like \chapter and \emph.
An example: graduate schools have very rigid requirements on how PhD dissertations are typeset. Usually these requirements are really stupid and were designed for a world where everyone used typewriters. So when I was writing my PhD dissertation I wrote a style file that described the stupid requirements; then my actual dissertation started with:
\documentclass{az-dissertation}
That version was for the bureaucracy only. For the "normal people's version" i.e. for researchers and students who wanted to read the dissertation, I just replaced that first line with
\documentclass[11pt]{book}
Voila! A well-typeset (i.e. readable) dissertation.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
The translator tex reads TeX/LaTeX files and generates a DVI file, which is a device (and resolution) independent description of the page. Rendering DVI to the screen is not too expensive.
If your document has any graphics files in it, those are represented as links (called \special) in the DVI file - i.e. no additional overhead in the process. It's when you're generating PostScript that embedded graphics files are a pain in the ass, because then you have to read the graphics file, convert it all to an ASCII hex format that a PostScript command like colorimage can use and then write out that (possibly huge) file.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
If LaTeX were to be used on the web, it would be a simple matter to only allow a well-defined set of .sty files - call those the "LaTeX on the Web" environment.
In this "LaTeX on the Web" environment, only some well-defined fonts would be available - perhaps the original "LaserWriter 13", or (preferably) set in the preferences of the browser that's doing the rendering. These fonts could be rasterised at the screen resolution in the common sizes ahead of time, so display of the DVI would be fast. A document wouldn't be able to use arbitrary fonts; you could only say things like \bfseries [which means use bold and bold-italic] instead of specifying fonts by name. You'd stick to \emph for italic and \begin{verbatim}...\end{verbatim} for monospaced/typewriter for the most part.
Of course all this will never happen, because then web sites would actually have to be about content.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
there's been a lot of talk about LaTeX on slashdot lately so i've taken the liberty to take a look at it. it seems decent enough, but apart from it being open-source, what benefits does it have over using Adobe Framemaker? Framemaker is absolutely phenomenal, and we use it where i work for all long (over 1,000 page) technical documents. does LaTeX (or LyX, or ...) have any benefits over using Framemaker?
and i don't know about all of you, but i happen to like PDF documents.
- j
If you wish to use a markup language that uses LaTeX-like syntax, try Latte. Latte is a real programming language, like TeX; it has looping, functions, and so on, and its very similar to Scheme. It makes markup a breeze. Give it a try.
-- developer_fuze
I have to admit, i laughed out loud when i saw this article...
Like everyone before me has said, LaTeX is for typesetting, and if anything, XML using XSL is more likely to take over the Web.
For kicks and giggles, try writing a LaTeX template, then take a stab at creating an XSL-stylesheet. Which is more straight-forward and inherently extensible? Which can you actually find training for? I worked with LaTeX day-in and day-out for 2 years, and was completely unable to find any courses or any trainer in the DC area that taught the creation of LaTeX stylesheets. I ended up editing stylesheets using a makeshift "uh, if i change this line, what happens?" kind of methodology. It worked and made me feel all warm and fuzzy and smart, but it was far from an efficient use of time. However, when it came to XML/XSL, my mother taught me how to write a basic XSL stylesheet within a day! How's that for resources?
I really think that the only reason people use LaTeX anymore is its unparalleled handling of mathematics. You really can't find anything that's comparable...Again, for kicks and giggles, find yerself a big complex equation. Grab a LaTeX book as a cheat sheet and code it. Then, open up Microsoft Word and try to create the same thing and see a)how long it takes and b)how horribly ugly it is.
What we really need is mainstream browser support for MathML...or even cooler, LaTeX support as a widely-available plugin for mainstream browsers (as opposed to IBM's TeXExplorer, which is really cool, but a goofy stylesheet can really hack up its rendering). Latex2html's a good solution for LaTeX content-pushing -- but the setup, and then the pre-conversion customization of latex code to reduce the amount of almost-required-cleanup of HTML code is daunting as hell.
(We had an older version of latex2html that aligned degree signs with the bottom of a line...can you imagine the searching and replacing of "align=middle" to "align=top" in all affected pages/articles? Ack. I was too happy when our systems guys set up a new version that fixed that + antialiased the equation-gifs.)
Then there's the question of fonts...
Wow, that was stupid. I apologize to the room at large and will now go sit in a corner, writing on a blackboard "always proofread your code" 50 times.
The correct link should be http://www.geocities.com/villageid1ot. So much for the new window addition.
Phyrkrakr "Always be yourself, regardless of state or federal laws."
Psychic spies from China try to steal your mind's elation.
(pure HTML 4.0 is a nightmare to code by hand)
As a webdesigner who prides himself on doing all of his coding by hand, I'd like to ask what the basis for the above comment is. I learned to code HTML at the age of 14, by myself, with the NCSA and the W3C pages my only guide. (here comes the shameless self plug) See the results at The Village Idiot . But in response to your question, the reason LaTeX could never replace HTML is stated in your question. "so the only big feature missing for LaTeX to be supported in browsers would be linking, perhaps object embedding." Linking is the very thing that makes the web work. IMO, it would be incredibly hard to redesign the web around a language, especially if that language doesn't carry at least some crossover in coding, much like javascript. My $.02
Phyrkrakr "Always be yourself, regardless of state or federal laws."
Psychic spies from China try to steal your mind's elation.
<html><head><title>HTML is easier than that!</title></head><body>
And, of course, you can simply strip out most of the advanced stuff when you just want to quickly bang out a few pages.
</body></html>
i.e. <IMG SRC="foo.jpg" ALT="bar"> in HTML 4 becomes <IMG SRC="foo.jpd" ALT="bar"/> in XHTML. Notice the addition of the "/" in the XHTML. There are minor differences. But XHTML is not supposed to vary greatly from HTML4, it is HTML4, just represented in XML compliant syntax.
Of course that should actually be <img src="foo.jpg" alt="bar" />
XHTML also requires tags be in all lower case.
--
Turn on, log in, burn out...
That almost sounds like a good idea, but it unfortunately falls flat. The number one rule is "Never trust the client", and with good reason. Look at the multitude of different clients out there, all with different strengths/weaknesses/capibilities. The only way to make sure the processing is done right is to do it yourself and then send it.
--
Turn on, log in, burn out...
It's amazing, when the topic of HTML and its evils/replacements/wishlists appears on /., how many people pop up that NEED native browser support for arbitrary mathematical notation.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
There's a problem and contradiction here. Rich interfaces require client side interactivity. Canned solutions such as Flash can only take you some way to Rich Interface Heaven(tm). That's where scripting becomes important. Like it or not, interfaces are Very Important and that makes scripting the future for the web.
The instant responses and feedback of a local interface just can't be replace by the limited, static, and poor interfaces of applications deployed on the web. Not without client side scripting, constant server roundtrips basically suck.
And you don't suggest replacing your browser with an X server do you?=)
-
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Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
HTML has already replaced LaTeX
Hey, nobody ever said English was logical; just memorize it and get on with your life. - Paul Brians
If you sit back and think why HTML is so widely used, you will see two important factors:
1) HTML is so forgiven for mistakes done by the user
2) HTML has a very small set of tags & rules to deal with
Remember that HTML is a subset of SGML. This was done intentionally so that the "average" user can start using it immediately (and in this case the average user were in fact profesional computer users doing research at a University.)
So if LaTeX is ever going to be used for the web it must first get adopted by the community at large -- given that SGML was not adopted, I don't see LaTeX having any chance.
-- George
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Don't be so sure. I've read most of Knuth's The TeXBook which describes how TeX (and hence LaTeX) actually works. It's remarcably complex. The first sentance of a paragraph can't be outputted (displayed) until the entire paragraph AND entire page are read, parsed, and optimized for display. This is how TeX minimizes hyphenation, orphans, poor inter-word spacing due to justification, etc.
In light of this, what others have said about (La)TeX not having to "re-render" the page if a window is resized is wrong. That would be akin to changing margins, page length, etc. That would be starting from scratch
What others have said is correct. (La)TeX is not meant for the web environment. That being said, it would be nice if there was a better way to unify the power of *Tex and the flexablity of HTML, XML, etc. (Perhaps XHTML does this -- I don't know). For this reason, I've actually been looking more into RMS's TeXInfo system. The downfall there is that one has to know all of the languages in questions: (La)Tex, HTML, INFO, etc.
Yeah, sure, I could send this over private email, but posting it on slashdot is so much more fun. It's Kyle, by the way.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I use LaTeX for my maths notes in lectures, because of the speed at which I can type the equations on my Psion. Then I transfer it to my Linux home machine, and create the postscript files et cetera there. The secret to saving time is to write a very small ten line bash script to recompile the source every time it changes (i.e. is saved) and then make sure that gsview is set up to check for postscript file changes. Jolly simple, and it took me about a minute to write. I may upload it to my website sometime over Christmas.
http://blog.grcm.net/
Your article is of poor, poor quality. You are
comparing two completely different approaches.
So before writing such an article think about
WHAT you are writing
http://linux.almaden.ibm.com/linux/demopkg/TechEx
i was pretty sure i saw something about that come through here a few months ago, and i was right. it looks pretty damn useful to me...
[|]
LaTeX is an excellent tool, but it's a tool to organize information into platform-independent documents. These documents are set up using pre-defined types (this is an article, a book, etc.), and then organized following the established structure for that document type. LaTeX then provides a variety of tools to simplify cross-referencing, indexing, and otherwise making logincal use of that information.
Using LaTeX to provide greater control over the layout of information on the Web seems like it would be falling into the same trap that ate HTML -- if you remember, HTML was originally intended to organize information in a logical hierarchy, not make pretty pictures.
The paragraph of links:
At least one other person has already pointed to TeX 2 HTML and LaTeX 2 HTML, so I'll just add that if you're interested in well structured documents on the Web, it is actually true that XML has a lot to offer. And as long as I'm listing sites off like a madman, let's not forget the good old W3C.
Oh, yeah...http://www.latex-project.org...
Coke Is It (1982)
* * *
It is a dada story -- it has no moral.
TeX is the last gasp of the programmer oriented word processor family, the thread that began with RUNOFF and went through nroff and troff. Let it die in peace.
Having Latex as a standard would defy almost all of the current web development philosophy out there.
:-|, HTML is good, it works, boohiss, ;)
Think: If I want to upsize the font with a latex document what happens, eeep my font sizes are all static
Jeremy
Or some other Tex.
The original power of HTML was that it could render properly on text and graphical browsers and was universal.
But now they wan't to format things for a specific screen size and run subprograms so all kinds of extra junk was added to force fit things.
Which Tex had all along. At this point you might be able to convert using a sufficiently advanced awk or perl script.
That is the best argument for switching to LaTeX I have heard yet :)
Those who do not know the past are doomed to reimplement it, poorly.
There is a really cool open source project called, LyX. (www.lyx.org) LyX is the first What-you-see-is-what-you-MEAN (WYSIWYM) document processor. Right now it seems to be geared to preparing scientific papers, but the possibilites are quite numerous...
the web did start out like that, then commercial forces took over and dictated that the page had to look *exactly* like blah blah blah corporate image waffle waffle branding et cetera
Obviously, this means that it's time for the First Annual Obfuscated Javascript contest ;-)
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
The problem is that much of the web seems to be designed by graphic artists coming from a print background rather than computer people. As such, they're deeply attached to the idea of fixing their work precisely, as paper printing both rewards and demands. They simply haven't adapted to the new format, and I get the impression that this actually gives something of an advantage to the inexperienced over the experienced. People who have never done graphics design before are more able to accept the limitations (and strengths) of the web than people transfering from another field. That's not to say that some traditional graphic artists haven't been able to make the transition effectively, but I think that it's a handicap.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
We'd have a Knuth-complete web technology then.
Why not write a browser plugin that can understand and translate LaTeX? That would be the most simple solution.
HTML/XHTML is pretty much a given -- it's going to be around until the End of Time, just like Cobol. You'll never outright replace it, but you can certainly enhance it or supplement it.
blog |
But why bother replacing HTML with LaTeX? XML is more extensible and is a closer relation to HTML in any case.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
What I'm doing is using latex to write a document with chapters, sections, etc. Then I use latex2html (look on freshmeat) to translate the latex to html.
The nice thing about this is that I automatically get things like tables of contents and (if I wanted it) and index, and navigation bars, and I can do global search and replace on the latex documentation if I decide I need to change something wherever it's referred to. And of course, I can print a very nice copy of the whole thing any time I want to.
The less nice thing is that the bookkeeping I used to do by section is harder. For instance, the html that I write for myself in xemacs has the date the page changed last at the bottom. I haven't figured out how to get this by document section in latex.
On the whole, I think the answer to your question is No. I think what's eventually going to happen is a markup language like XML, which will be translatable to html for browsing, TeX for printing, etc...
But I tried using docbook while I was fiddling with this problem, and I don't think the tools for using XML are there yet. I'd be happy to find I'm wrong about that.
Forager
student of animation and the fine arts
CSS is used more than those other technologies. XML seems to making headway recently as well.
Or maybe I just surround myself with that news and see the world in a slightly bias light.
the trouble with flash is that it's a closed format, as such it won't gain universal acceptance unless its a miracle worker. users need to be able to 1.open the page requireing flash, 2. notice they dont have it, click on a link to autoinstall it without closing the site or closing the other seven sites i have open i just havent read yet, 3. and keep on browsing seemlessly. (the one time i've bothered to install flash, the browser had to reboot, and i couldn't remember what site i had found off the search engine and browser also closed all of the other pages i had also found that didn't require flash, it was annoying).
every user who would rather close the one page and not come back because its too much trouble... we'll i guess they dont need those customers anyway.
---
the above is sarcasm
I agree that XML does what you describe, but if you re-read the part you quoted, he actually does NOT say exactly that XML handles 'content and visual formatting', merely that it promises to clean up that boundary. This sounds like "let XML define the data, and let <technology X> define the visual formatting" to me, but it is a blatant misunderstanding that XML is an alternative to HTML as stated in the last sentence.
I've been doing numerous web projects where we use XML for data, and use some form of transformation to HTML for browser presentation. Look into XSLT for what I think is the coolest way to make these transformations. When done correctly, XSLT is orders of magnitudes faster than some ASP/PHP page combined with client-side scripting will ever be, IMNSHO.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Why should latex replace pdfs? In fact, I regularly use latex to create my pdf files! Using either pdflatex or ps2pdf. That way I have the power and functionality of latex and the flexibility of distributing pdfs.
Ever heard of XHTML? (specification)
It has the potential to be all that, AFAIR. I read the specification a while ago and it looked mighty interesting. Newly standardised and easy to code, especially if you are familiar with the concepts of XML.
Trian
I'm no longer fed up with MS Windows: I go rid of them
I agree! What is needed is polishing pdfLaTeX, freeing/opening acroread and helping xpdf get mature.
Microsoft doesn't own HTML either.
--Nicholas
I think you mistakenly filed this under "LaTeX CONs".
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
LaTeX kind of tries to hide TeX, but it doesn't really do a very good job of it. Any non-trivial LaTeX document eventually seems to end up looking like it's written in Teco...
-Miles
We live, as we dream -- alone....
i once had similaritis, but some penicillin cleared that right up.
Don't get me wrong, I love LaTeX and use it as my general word processor for almost everything that has to look nice. But, have you tried to do a text search on dvi file? hehe, can't do it. If you want to send pure LaTeX, which HEAVILY depends on the local installation of the files, then have you seen how slow the latex command is (along with the font creation, etc...)?
If you then make your output a PDF file, or if you convert it to HTML with latex2html, then you can see the hyperlinks. You can also make hyper-tables-of-contents and indices and stuff like that.
"If we couldn't laugh at things that didn't make sense,
My bicyles
The only thing missing is the stylesheets! If anyone could produce a way to add dynamic page boundaries with headers, footers, footnotes etc. directly on your XML file when it's converted to PDF noone would miss latex!
LaTeX is more of a display language, to define exactly how some text should look.
Of course, I wouldn't mind the web being redone in TeX/LaTex simply becuase I could display $math$ formulae with ease!
I've been using LaTeX for the last year or so, through this program called LyX (www.lyx.org). Think of it as a GUI front-end to LaTeX, keeping the more complex details out of sight if you don't want them.
.doc files into messy, ugly .html files, and so forth.
Anyway, my point is -- I've found LaTeX to be an incredibly versatile piece of technology, and it works great. I've used it for my term papers, even stuff I've published on the web. I experimented a bit with the language itself without the help of LyX, and I love the flexibility and power.
I'd be thrilled if LaTeX became the standard of the web... So many document formats can be converted to TeX with almost no effort, so why not? This would probably end up being even simpler and clean than the way we do stuff now, converting
Of course, there's always the possibility that Microsoft and Netscape (or whoever) would end up trying to "extend" LaTeX/TeX like they did HTML, and we all know how well THAT turned out...
-----
Anything that can go wr
For maintaining records in a historical condistion pdf just can't be beat.. its ONE flat file that will always look the same
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
(pure HTML 4.0 is a nightmare to code by hand)
.html files or use a converting program to convert to HTML.
Wow...you code HTML?? you are so 733+!! I usually write HTML, and if you find HTML complicated..you need to come into the real world....html, even compared to BASIC, is pie! it is not a programming language, you don't "code" it...it is a Markup language! that is what it was meant to be and that is what it is. HTML does what it is supposed to do very well. If you have problems "coding" HTML look into getting a WYSIWYG and you can actually see what you are making. Or you can use M$ products such as word and Publisher and save files as
The anti-salmon
I totally agree. LyX is so good that many people I showed it to now run Linux to can use it.
Cheers, Mickey. [Team Opie|OpenZaurus|OpenSIMpad|Wellenreiter]
Sounds alot like Logo. Or Hypercard.
Unfortunately, HTML owes more of it's lineage to Lotus Notes and "What is the minimum I need to put my research paper online" than either of those products. Well, you've got Flash and PDF -- feel free to use 'em.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
So, TeX is better (much better) for your own work when you only need to produce a good looking document to your own design, LaTeX is better if you need to keep someone else happy.
Personally, if LaTeX ever suited what I need I'd probably just use Word instead.
You also have a very out-moded vision of HTML as a classification language. That is what it should be but the last 4 years of effort in HTML has been to move it to a layout language, which is a shame but there it is.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I disagree. Parsing LaTeX is harder than parsing HTML, because:
IMHO HTML + MathML, if adopted by "both of you know who", would be a good web alternative to LaTeX, still XML is a way to go. If you need layout and hyperlinks, you can have PDF with LaTeX in the back-stage.
TeX is a typesetting language. LaTeX (IMHO) is a big step towards being more content-based. For myself, I rarely ever think about presentation when editing a LaTeX documnent, except when my equations are too big for one line. Yes, LaTeX does have a bunch of layout stuff in it (mostly because of TeX, I think), but then, it's hard to write without any thought as to layout.
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
The other problem with TeX is that it is really intended for printed pages. People are used to systems which pander more to screen resolution than TeX does.
Overall, I don't think that TeX, as currently implemented, is likely to replace html. One could come up with a totally different backend with the same language, but that would be a real project.
On the other hand, dvi, perhaps with a standard bundling method to include images and other figures would make a really nice open replacement for pdf. And the underlying \box model of the TeX engine totally rocks. It even made it into the swing libraries as a layout manager. Is the only layout manager that is easy to use :-)
You really should declare a document type here.
Yes, I should, but I don't know of any browser with a user base > 500 people that will choke on that ommission.
You have set a background colour without setting contrasting text colours. This is going to make life very difficult for people who have set their default text colour to white, light grey, yellow, etc. You didn't take that into account, did you?
Yes, I did take it into account. Then I ignored it because you can't make everything perect for everybody in ANY sort of publishing.
You've used arbitrary pixel widths for your tables. This can cause unecessary problems for users with lower resolution displays (e.g. WebTV) or who have chosen to use small-windowed browsers. It also defeats one of HTML's main features by forcing one layout across multiple configurations and users.
That "main feature" has evolved into a major problem for developers. The large variety of different sorts of information presented through a web browser make it far too complicated for HTML to just be a mark-up language anymore. Layout is necessary, as evidenced by the growing number of layout tools in the HTML spec. Pages should target the lowest reasonable common denominator, which in this case is a 600 pixel browser window.
why not use table header () tags to designate your row headers (and use more descriptive headers too). While you're at it, consider using the caption, header, and footer elements.
Because while a nice theory, in practice this almost always results in obfuscated and overly-tagged code.
You've failed to provide alternative text for non-sighted and non-inline-image-displaying brower users.
I considered that a good thing. Do you really want a verbal description of that picture?
You should really also include width and height attributes so as to help the browser place the image.
Doesn't that defeat your whole argument about HTML being strictly for mark-up? Isn't that forcing layout?
HTML authors should consider *all* of the media on which their document can be viewed, not just the display of a graphical browser.
Uh, why? HTML is a lousy format for printed work and shouldn't be used that way.
there's a lot more to good HTML markup than just throwing tags around
HTML is a subset of SGML, and should never be seriously considered for the type of markup you imply. Sorry, I think you were looking for the XML story and got lost.
<HEAD>
<TITLE>What's so difficult about HTML?</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgcolor="FFFFFF">
<TABLE width="600">
<TR>
<TD><B>Column One</B></TD>
<TD><B>Column Two</B></TD>
</TR>
<TR>
<TD>A Picture:</TD>
<TD><IMG src="../graphics/goatsex.jpg><TD>
</TR>
<TR>
<TD>Link:</TD>
<TD><A HREF="http://www.goatse.cx/">Click Here!</A></TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>
</BODY>
</HTML>
I would like to point out myself that I didn't close one tag properly before I get flamed for it :-/
BTW, I produced a half decent résumé in LaTeX (got me 3 interviews and 3 job offers, each interviewer mentioned that it stood out from the pack). If anyone wants the source, send me an email.
Don't know if this applies to you, but almost all hitech companies scan resumes into a database (mine does), which means no matter how well tuned the original is, the potential hiring manager only sees 10pt Courier plaintext. And if you get too fancy, the OCR includes tons of graphics characters and typos into the scan.
---
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
. . . Because the stupid Windows software (Office, et al) doesn't know what LaTeX is, and most (99.9%) of the users don't know enough to scream for better. 1Alpha7
Live to be Moderated
Okay, it's late and I'm tired and not feeling well, so feel free to mod this down if you like, but the mere thought of LaTeX makes me want to hurl. Erk...use it instead of html? Bleah...*running to bathroom*
"It is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it."
Time is fun when you're having flies.
-Kermit the Frog
... is The LaTeX Web Companion (ISBN 0201433117) by Michel Goosens and Sebastian Rahtz.
I'm not really sure to get it. LaTeX, a good way to write documents, but WEB??? Why not get on XML and go on something that is pretty interesting, starting to be well supported, and be used by Micro$oft??? ;-)
I spent about 5 months writing a book in SGML, but ended up converting to LaTeX because SGML was becoming an enormous headache. The separation between content and presentation sounds good in theory, but the present implementation just doesn't work too well when it comes time to generate presentable output. (I'm thinking of Jade here.)
.pdf or .ps format). LaTeX has given me much more control over my book than I ever had with SGML. Presentation is PART of writing a book - try as you might to separate the two, you'll end up with a work of inferior quality if you ignore presentation while you write.
SGML and XML are great for writing technical documents that need to be presented in a variety of formats, but it's usually not a good idea to use it for documents that are intended for traditional printing (or even online publication in
LaTeX is a pleasure to work with. Its (TeX-based) syntax is concise, it has a powerful set of pre-defined environments, and I especially like the ability to easily define my own macros for just about any type of document convention (warning/note boxes, code listings, etc).
I'll also point out that the whole intent of LaTeX is to allow for a separation between content and presentation; plain TeX is at the opposite extreme (it's a raw formatting language with more features than Microsoft's finest bloatware and no known bugs since 1989). Properly used, LaTeX specifies only content and semantics, with all of the formatting contained in a set of macros.
-John
(a very happy LaTeX user)
FWIW, the document in question is at http://www.lokigames.com/%7Eovercode/lgp/lgp.pdf. It's formatted with pdflatex and about two pages of custom macros. I'd be happy to send my macro file to anyone who's interested.
Um if HTML is so easy why cant you construct a simple link to your site? http://www.geocities.com/villageid1ottarget=_top doesn't work.
Blah Blah Blah...
You are missing the gains that you get from Compiling, namely that latex is doing a degree of validity checking for you. This takes time, but there again so does running a validating parser on HTML, which would give you the same effect. Also it is worth noting that latex compilation is also taking care of the page layout and rendering for you. With HTML this happens on the fly by the browser, which actually takes some time, although as you only read one small bit at a time this is not normally noticable.
As for constantly going back to emacs to compile, you should find that emacs will do all of this for you, with at most a make file thrown in.
You are right about the syntax though. HTML is cleaner. None the less the fact that latex has a some degree of separation between layout and logical document structure makes for latex a better language.
I would hope in the future that something like docbook, can be advanced to the stage where it supports all of the features of latex. If it were done well it might help to overcome latex's main problem which is that its a bugger to customise. But docbook certainly is not there yet.
Phil
At this point I'd like to take a moment to express my seething hatred for frontpage.
thank you.
Ummmm, how about for a kindergarten class putting up a web page? I think that is the key to why HTML has become so popular.
personally, I prefer lamb skin. but as they say, each to his own.
LaTeX's strength is the beauty of its output. It's not that simple or easy to use or anything (it's not that difficult, either). But it is very flexible, very powerful, and looks gorgeous when printed.
Producing such nice output isn't easy. It can take minutes to render a large document from source to the final output. This is not good for the web.
Finally, LaTeX was designed for printed output. Bringing it to the web would require something so different that it wouldn't be LaTeX anymore.
BTW, I produced a half decent résumé in LaTeX (got me 3 interviews and 3 job offers, each interviewer mentioned that it stood out from the pack). If anyone wants the source, send me an email.
I use LaTeX for the company phone directory. When a user goes to the "generate" page, a database-generated latex file is passed through pdflatex, and the user is pointed to the resulting .pdf file. If not for Acrobat it would have been harder to use LaTeX in this context.
It replaced Lambskin in most parts of the world. Why shouldn't HTML be next?
By gateway, do you mean that people are going all migrate to custom XML markups or other page description languages from HTML/XHTML? Nope! The vastvastvastvast majority of pages on the web have are perfectly fine in XHTML/HTML.
And the real joke is that XHTML is all that different from HTML. Take a look at the HTML 4 spec, and then look at the XHTML spec... the only difference is that a proper XHTML doc has an xml-version tag, and the doctype is a little different. More nearly all purposes HTML 4= XHTML 1.... -Ross
I have serious issues with UIML that I do not wish to get into at 1:51 in the AM. Lets just say that UIML is overkill for tasks that could easily be standardized through ECMA, thereby bypassing any virtual machine.
Finder of the any key.
errr... I mispoke above. You get a cookie if you can see where.
Finder of the any key.
Oi, vai.
I probably should elaborate. LaTeX serves one function and only one function well. This is the generation of Greek, Hebrew, et al. letters and it creates them within math equations. Now, as a tool for the other 99.9999999999999999% of people, it blows worse than MicroSoft (there's irony in that name if you consider what Billy Boy is over-compensating for) Word!!! It is over-complicated (not say it isn't easy, just in comparison to other markup langs), overly verbose, and overly time-consuming. NOT TO MENTION THE COMPILING!! I just do not see it even approaching the level of excellence you physicists place it as. Gimme MathML and PhysicsML (not yet scheduled for release) any day, if even just to save me the step of re-writing LaTeX files into a web-sourced format (a flawed process at best).
Finder of the any key.
but TeX is even more inflexible in allowing the user to determine what his screen should look like.
Try setting "\hsize=6.5in \vsize=9.0in" to fit a standard 1 inch margin paper size. Better yet, "\hsize=$windowwidth \vsize=$something_really_big", and you would get more of a webborwser like rendering (and optimisation would be easier because TeX wouldn't have to worry about page breaks).
Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
TeX (and it's idiot bastard progeny, LaTeX) are a prime example of all that is kludgy, evil and stupid about the Unix world.
Tell that to xxx.lanl.gov: have you seen how much research is posted to the e-print archives!? Almost all of it was written with LaTeX.
Like you say at the end, LaTeX is good for mathematicians (physicists, etc.). I'm of the humble opinion that, FOR SCIENTISTS, LaTeX rocks. What's funny is now, when you send email to some collaborator talking about such and such an equation, everyone uses LaTeX commands.
dabacon
Heh. :)
"I've recently learned how to use Latex,"
Good for you! Didja have to read the instructional packet that came with it?
"Is it better than HTML?"
This one takes some thinking: is Latex better than HTML. Hmm. I say, yes Latex *is* better than HTML, if you know what I mean. HTML is fake man, get it for real! Use Latex!
Always use protection my friends, whether LaTeX or HTML.
I guess my question would be this: Why can't the best features and typesettings be incorporated to HTML? I, admittedly, do not remember much HTML syntax (WYSIWYG spoiled me... =-( ) but it seems to me that the next version of HTML should include a full-featured equation notation that can at a bare minimum compete with MS Equation Editor. Of course I may just be way off base...
If your latex file contains a few graphics and several pages it can take absolutely ages to generate a .ps file from it.
Dunno about you, but the web's slow enough as it is imho..
-Steve
--- The views contained herein are my own, not those of my employer or anyone else.
HTML is somewhat like that, but it was NEVER intended to be a document processing language, no matter how often it tries to be used that way. The beauty of HTML is I can create a web-based application with database backends quickly and easily, while letting the browswer take care of specific layout. Most web page designers (and all commercial web page designers) have forgotten that is what the web is supposed to be about. The main thing with the web is hyperlinks and information. NOT document layout!
To summarize, you are asking to use the wrong tool for the job. I wouldn't write a database front-end using latex, and likewise, I wouldn't try to typeset a paper or a book using html.
"i've never heard of XSL, or XLT"
XSL is the Extensible Style Language, and XLT doesn't exist AFAIK, but XSLT is the XSL Transformation Language, which can be used to automatically transform XML into other languages like HTML.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
There is, however, a new language emerging which promises to clean up the blurred boundaries of content and visual formatting, and get rid of the most flagrant horrors of HTML. If you want to see an HTML alternative, go look into XML.
XML defines document syntax, but doesn't have anything to do with 'content and visual formatting'. Sorry to see an otherwise intelligent post present this common misconception.
You're right, but I don't agree. ;)
:)
My philosophy is: Simplicity, Efficiency, Versatility, Security, Privacy
If there's anyone else out there who think he/she might have the same idea, please let me know.
HTML was originally written, what, over 10 years ago. It was intended as a simple way of formatting web pages, allowing a little variety in text, as well as hyperlinks and images. Although it has been updated, it was never intended for all the scripting, image maps, and everything else people have done with it today. Simple HTML is still 100% compliant on all browsers!
-MR
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
The award for finding a bug in TeX is not $3.14, but $327.68, and that's not for all bugs. Take a look here, lines47 and 48:
3.14159, is the latest version of TeX.
--
A member of the first GPL-ed software project in my country
Others have correctly pointed out that LaTeX tries for structural markup (as HTML) was originally intended to do. When you write LaTeX you say what things mean and deal with how those look separately.
But LaTeX is inappropriate as an HTML replacement for a number of reasons:
Now there are some good ways to use LaTeX on the web. First of all, any TeXie interested in that should look at the book The LaTeX Web Companion . Second there is a (not free) browswer plug-in for reading LaTeX, TeXExplorer. But mostly, there is the simple fact that TeX and LaTeX can produce fully hyperlinked PDF natively. So if you want something portable, linked, and have full and complete control over what the document looks like, then produce PDF with pdflatex.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
XML can be effectively used to separate content and presentation, which makes several output formats possible, for instance HTML, WML, PDF. Since modern web publishing relies on this there is quite certainly no interest in using LaTeX.
(check out the XML Apache Project if you want to simplify the management of your web site in this way)
This is the Retro of Technologies if you ask me. Indeed, early computer science are good computer science. In those days, computer scientists were real mathematicians. They can recite logic rules in Latin! They made good programs which last FOREVER! Then came the 90s, pretty faced college babies who just wannabe another millionaire. These guys can't even solve a set of simultaneous equations (wot?) And they made really really bad programs. A while ago on /. a thread on Multics brought up a few basic OS issues which have never been resolved since Unix Date 0.0.0. Indeed, there has never been a radically improved new OS design since that date. (Err ... also Internet is a really really bad patch by one Mr. Bill Joy to the original OS ... that's why you have so much problem on Internet today ...)
What is 30 years in eternity? On Unix Date 1 Jan 2000, people will look back and say, hey, in between Unix Date year 20-30, nothing fruitful had been contributed to Civilisation. And (hopefully), from Unix Date 1 Jan 0031, "they" have gone back to the basics and re-laid the foundation for the Galactic AC.
There are already enough markup and meta-languages out there without adding more. I like the structure of xml, css and html and don't see the point of having anything that even remotely resembles the garbage of html.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
oh, were talking code. my bad. go trojans!
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Er... don't ASP's just dynamically generate HTML? Wouldn't the LaTeX equivalent therefore just dynamically create LaTeX markup in exactly the same way?
If slashdot felt this "story" worth posting, should they not give us the choice to enter comments as "LaTeX" formatted?
GONE FISHING
yes there are
GONE FISHING
right here
GONE FISHING
I use LaTeX because I have to. I mean, is there some other software that can give you such pretty and professional-looking results (exclude WYSIWYG software which produces LaTeX code)?
I invested some time in learning LaTeX and I am happy about that.
It is REALLY difficult to produce ugly documents with LaTeX, since it's relatively easy with HTML, but I do not think LaTeX should replace HTML, just because it is too hard to create simple documents. Hey, but that's a nice idea to exclude from web publishing those people whose cat has a homepage, you know what I mean... But then WYSIWYG-LaTeX-disgusting-code generators will proliferate... no, no please (fear!)! Ok I go back to the previous idea: let HTML (and other - useless or not- addons) rule the www. LaTeX is for writing stuff that will be on paper.
LaTex is a free software, that means I can use it without paying and without feeling guilty for not paying it, and the documentation is complete.
Ok I should beter go and write my philosophy paper. In LaTeX of course.
But .tex files are so tiny! And what do you write your PDF files with? I use LaTeX, and then dvips, ps2pdf.
Yeah, programs type "correct" html.
Ever tried to:
1) clean up generated html? That's hard work. But then you'll half the size of the document and that's so rewarding.
2) verify if the code respects w3c standards?
oh, anyway no browser respects them.
I have to use LaTeX in my EE classes, and I have to say that it is NOT superior to HTML. First of all the syntax is hard to type. Where are in HTML, you use tags, in LaTeX, you have to use \blah{foo} tags. This wouldn't be so bad if the tags were standarized. There are 2-3 tags sometimes for one same function, and these tags are based on certain builds of the compiler. That's right, you have to compile the .tex code after you type it in Emacs. This is really time consuming when you have to write, compile, and view in GSview, find out that you forgot to italicize that word, go back to Emacs, recompile, and then use GS. Also, on Solaris, you have to compile from .tex to .dvi, and then from .dvi to .ps. Waste of time! HTML is much faster in terms of formating text.
I use Latex for my everyday work. I love Latex, but i don't think it should be useful to change html to latex. I mean, what are the improvements ? Anyway, if you want to use latex instead of html, it is already possible : Write in latex and then translate it with latex2html. It supports almost every latex features including cross-referencing or hypertext links. The work to be done in my opinion, in this point of view, is to develop latex2html, eventually make a configuration gui, and add some new commands to latex such as inserting jpeg files.
Just a thought, considering the sheer number of TeX and LaTeX documents out there, wouldn't it be could if someone wrote a web browser plugin to render these documents within IE and Netscape, etc. the same way as Adobe Acrobat does.
It would open up the material to a wider audience who wouldn't need any expertise to use and view them.
In addition it would allow people to publish complex, richly formatted documents online without having to compromise layout or functionalilty without having to purchase Acrobat from Adobe.
Just a though.
/usr/bin/awake/too/long
It is a common mantra of the XML community that it is advantageous to seperate style and content, but there are a few snags to this. Firstly, stylesheets are not Turing-complete, and hence are not able to render all the types of transformation that you may want. Therefore, you do have to consider how your data is to be formatted when defining your schema. Secondly, there is by no means a hard and fast rule about what constitutes style and what constitutes content. XML/XSL provides a two-level delineation that unnecessarily constrains ones method of working. LaTeX fares no better on either count. I would suggest using something like LISP or PostScript, which both have a wonderfully regular syntax, are easy to edit, and can represent data and semantics in a single continuous conceptual space... leaving it up to the designer to have a whole hierarchy of levels, from the top-level (most declarative) layer, to the bottom-level formatting layer. Of course, people will end up using XML because it is seen as the "standard" now, which is quite depressing really.
Using it's full set of features often means multiple passes of the input file in order to render the document to a printable format. As such it is an inapropriate tool for providing web pages on the fly. I routinely use Latex to produce high quality documents without having to give too much thought to the layout. There are programs about of varying quality to convert them to html ( I use tex4ht) & again most of these need several passes to properly format the document.
HTML, XHTML etc are designed to be used with web browsers & to be rendered on the fly & as consequence considerably simpler than latex & a bit more rigid in terms of format.
> I have to use LaTeX in my EE classes, and I
.tex code > after you type it in Emacs.
> have to say that it is NOT superior to HTML.
Correct, it is optimized for different purpose. LaTeX is for describing documents, HTML for describing web pages.
> First of all the syntax is hard to type. Where
> are in HTML, you use tags, in LaTeX, you have
> to use \blah{foo} tags.
I find the \blah{foo} easier to type and read than <blah>foo</blah>.
> This wouldn't be so bad if the tags were
> standarized.
They are, there have been *one* major revision of LaTeX in the same time as HTML has went through 4 major revisions.
> There are 2-3 tags sometimes for one same
> function, and these tags are based on certain
> builds of the compiler.
What are you talking about?
> That's right, you have to compile the
Just like with HTML, this depends on the software you use.
If HTML had simply had a "go to pixel x,y" we would not be in this horrid mess of incompatable browsers and be in constant fear of MicroSoft screwing the world by changing their browser. Yes the purists would have cringed at such a command, but the masses would have rejoiced!
If I could design it from scratch, the language understood by the browser would be have had commands like this:
If this had been done browsers would probably be small programs, about as hard to write as IRC clients, and there would be hundreds of them.
Yes we did.
We are a wireless company. By moving to XHTML we were able to easily translate our entire site into WML on the fly. This has reduced the time and effort that would have been requrired to have everting in different formats. Our main applications are all in XML and render to XHML, WML and other related formats.
--
I'm well aware of the distinction between XML and XSL et. al., and my point was exactly that- by devoting itself to content, XML clears up the content/formatting boundary. However, I felt that going into the technical details would be beside the point, especially in a post that was already too long, so I referred to XML in an aggregate sense, including XML itself and the adjoining formatting/presentation tehnologies (XSL and whatever else).
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" -Salvor Hardin
I don't know if this is a good idea or not. PDF is basically compressed PostScript, and as such is a vector-based physical markup language. You can translate LaTeX to PostScript, just as you can translate JPEG images to PostScript. You don't want LaTeX (a high-level language) replacing PostScript (a low-level language) any more than you'd want to replace assembly language with C.
~wog
Good luck!
XHTML is easy to generate and work with from an object oriented structure so I'd have to give it my thumbs up. Recently been experimenting with how to render XHTML into Postscript (for local printing) and rendering into Latex would be interesting also. Know of any really good books on xhtml? Most of the ones I've seen were to technical to be useful to the average developer.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
designates a paragraph which will probably contain data. There is no markup saying that paragraph must do anything else. Exactly how to display a paragraph is left up to the rendering engine. LaTeX doesn't leave this option open by default, it designates the information but then ties that to a set of display instructions.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
You want LyX!!!
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
You need MathML. Already available in special nightlies of Mozilla for Windows and Linux.
Gerv
As interesting as the idea is, LaTeX is not a good broadcast format for the web. For one, it assumes pagination. For another, it would need a fair amount more horsepower to render, unless you pare away much of its power. (TeX/LaTeX can be a programming language all its own; compare the difference between PDF and Postscript)
LaTeX's true strength over HTML (or any other flavor of SGML) is in authoring. The language, the syntax is well-suited to manual editing. Consider seeing this in a text editor:
<thought>Where is my attaché case?</thought> he wondered.
versus this:
\thought{Where is my attach\'e case?} he wondered.
Of course, the best way to read LaTeX is with xdvi, but at least it is possible to read untypeset prose without the constant mental stops imposed by the verboseness of *ML syntax.
This is why I think LaTeX (or at least a well-defined subset thereof) would better fit a role as a source language for *ML documents. The Hyperlatex program already makes this possible, for HTML at least. (A generic LaTeX-to-SGML converter would be much more useful-- but alas, it appears such a program has yet to be written)
iSKUNK!
It was never intended for hyper-precise description of the layout of the material.
No it wasn't. Unfortunately, 99% of web designers don't know that. I have a big suspicion that most of them don't even know what HTML even is. If these guys want to be taken seriously by developers, then they need to start holding html code reviews, logging bugs and defects against their design, and instituting the bare minimums of software engineering.
When the entire world is using screwdrivers to hammer in nails, don't bash the guy asking about tools to drive in screws with.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
While I am a big fan of LaTeX, and have used it for some very large projects, I think that the author of this proposal has missed the important difference between LaTeX and HTML. HTML is a page level tool, while LaTeX is a document level tool. It is devlish to try to control layout of an individual page in LaTeX, but fairly easy in HTML.
The problem with HTML is that it is too blunt a tool for many tastes, and as a result people would like a method that gives finer control. That method exists, and is called Postscript. In my opinion the web should go the route of Postscript and PDF....
I used to think that the solution to the web was DVI. If you do any amount of HTML analysis you will see the things people do to make web pages look how they want them to look. The ways pictures are broken up, the stuff done with tables to align things just so, it's puzzling to me. HTML isn't about controlling the look but that's how it is used by anybody who is an "expert" at it. Further, picture and text go together and on many pages if you lose a picture or two the whole flow of the page can be screwed up. All the more reason why PDF or DVI should be how the web is rendered, when you request a page you get a compressed binary that contains that page and its layout, just one chunk, not 30 requests to produce one page. Further, the rendering environment is known and controlled, the producer can see the exact output ahead of time, none of this java script that detects which brower you're using so it can properly generate tricky HTML. I personally think this would be awesome, plus you'd get the benefits of PDF or DVI (really PDF anymore, pdflatex is the only way to fly) you'd get compressed documents, encryption and authentication, watermarking, etc..
Downside? Yes, unfortunately there are some. HTML is far more dynamic, there isn't a compile phase. This makes it much easier to generate it on the fly and to do interactive stuff. I also think there is an evolutionary aspect to the net that makes HTML more desirable for this kind of thing. Initially HTML was simple, there were really only a few tags in early versions of Cello and Mosaic. Then it grew more complex, it's finally reaching the level of complexity where something like LaTeX would have been the answer if we knew it was going to get this complex. LaTeX/TeX are nearly complete in an academic sense, they take a great number of factors in to account. HTML has added stuff when it was desired. HTML is quickly becoming an unwielding hydra but if you want you can use only a tiny and simple subset of it and keep it very simple, more importantly the general direction of HTML/XHTML is to make it is to something that humans don't generate but software does and it will evolve with that in mind. I still have yet to find a good software LaTeX generator that does anything more complicated than build a graphic or something. If HTML was to stay as a human used document production language then there is no question, we should use LaTeX and PDF and DVI because the problem is tough and one of the few real geniuses of our time put in 15 years solving it for us, but I don't think that's the case.
FWIW, there is idvi and acrobat and they both integrate nicely with browsers.
This is my signature. There are many signatures like it but this one is mine..
I've tried this some but never found a package that I found sufficiently usable... What did you use?
--Ben
PS
For anyone who hasn't learned LaTeX, do it. Get The LaTeX book and learn. You'll be glad you did.
--Ben
I was about to suggest that LaTeX is much harder to parse, but given the length of time it takes to display some of the web pages out there, I don't know.
There's the added bonus that TeX works. For years, Donald Knuth was offering monetary rewards for bugs. He recently declared that he didn't think there were any more bugs in TeX and was going to halt development to maintain compatibility.
Compare you favourite browser's bugs.
As a pragmatist I believe in using the right tools for a job, and as much as Microsoft and Netscape have bastardised HTML it's still not the right tool for pixelperfect layout.
The main idea is that HTML code is renderable in any HTML compliant browser, abusing HTML code like you suggest is shortsighted and really plain stupid. After all, not everyone is using NetexplorerScape version 10.7 release 3beta7.
I must say I did find immense pleasure this year in having my team learn LaTeX for all technical documents they wrote. (all converted to html with LaTeX2html of course!).
--
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
Nothing is real but the pain
There is some work that is already in progress for integrating TeX (and LaTeX) with the Web. One procedure is to convert LaTeX to HTML - done by programs like latex2html . What the original post is asking for - is done by HyperTeX.
One reason that LaTeX would not be popular is the way it forces you to write well structured documents - something that can be done in HTML if you wish, but you won't be forced to do so. The more common objection to LaTeX - cryptic commands and no WYSIWYG editor - LyX provides a decent enough WYSIWYG editor.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head><title>HTML is easy</title></head>
<body>
<h1>HTML is easy</h1>
<p><acronym title="Hypertext Markup Language">HTML</acronym> is easy. It is a simple way of defining text. All you need to know is what your paragraphs, your headings, and your markup are and the HTML will do the rest. Javascript isn't suppose to be there...it is just rot for the web designers who want <em>Really Cool Effects</em>. Well...I suppose I haven't seen a good use for Javascript yet...I would love to be surprised.</p>
</body>
</html>
Quite so. HTML4.x is dead easy to produce - especially if you've got a decent editor like Xemacs with its psgml mode - a simple right-click in the document will show you only the tags that the DTD says are valid in the current context. What could be nicer?
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Also - a hyperlink extension to LaTeX has been written - it's called HyperTeX. There is also a `Companion' book on the subject:"The LaTeX Web Companion : Integrating TeX, HTML and XML".
Russ
... and never, ever play leapfrog with a unicorn.
I've looked into this problem in the past. TeX was considered briefly for early web content but PC's were too damn slow to be useful. Now PCs are fast enough to run the TeX engine in what appears to be real time.
For those that have just used LaTeX and not TeX, TeX is very powerful. You do have full control over where ever single letter goes if you want it. Its a complete programming language and is a well designed system. Its major weakness is lack of good vector and raster graphics. It is powerful enough to do things like make decissions based on its page size but the rules will need to be tweeked for things like WAP phones since the hints on page layout were designed for letter and book sized paper. There had been packages in the past that would do a very good job rendering TeX documents on vt320 terminals.
LaTeX won't quite fit the bill of what is needed for the web as its currently used. It would be quite simple to write a package like LaTeX for the web that meets the requirements of how the web works. Such a system if properly deisgned would allow things to print out correctly as well as behave correctly on the screen. That means things like floating foot notes on the screen and pritned at the bottom of the page on dead tree versions.
For this to become wide spread, all it would require is that the code exists and the results be shown to a few marketters. I know my companys head of sales would force the entire site in to TeX if it fixed the printing problem. It wouldn't matter if 99.9% of the customers couldn't read it.
What I would like to see is support for TeX's math expressions in web browsers. I've tried to create math-oriented web pages before, and it's a big pain in the ass. I'd love to be able to do something like:
and have the browser react appropriately (graphical browsers render an image, text browsers output the TeX code).-- $SIGNATURE
...because XML is a *general* solution to describing structured data. For instance, the schema (DTD, whatever) may be tailored for document-type data, like XHTML, or perhaps to describe the structure of Real Life books. But we may also use XML to describe multimedia presentations, database structure, etc., etc. XML can describe pretty much anything under the sun, short of a few complicated things my poor brain probably couldn't understand, which you must use SGML for (XML being itself an application of SGML, eek!). So I see application-specific data formats going away. XML provides rules for describing the structure of any data you want. The point is to avoid niche, application-specific formats. Now, I don't know everything about LaTeX, but it seems to have a very specific application. Just because PDFs can be viewed pretty much everywhere, doesn't mean we should turn the web into PDF-land.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
What is wrong with using a Turing-complete markup langauge? Yes, you have security issues, but those would be easy to handle with TeX. Yes, you can enter an infinite loop, but that means your reader gets borred and closes the window.
No, I can not think of any reason why the "original" purpose of the web would not be better served by a high quality typsetting system like TeX as opposed to HTML. (Note: I said the original purpose of the web, i.e. academics sharing documents online, not ecommerce, porn, or flash games)
Actually, I can think of one reason a Turing-complete langauge would really kick the shit out of HTML: forms are one of the dumbest user interfaces ever invented, so Sun created Java, but Java sucks because Sun created on their buisness based timeline. Honestly, we would all be much better off if the browsers had a working programming langague prior to the web becomming a buisness.
I do not think LaTeX would be a really smart choice for a web markup langauge, but compiling a modified version of LaTeX into Display PostScript (with hyperlinks added) would kick the shit out of HTML (even today with all of HTML's extra features).
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I have to say I don't think XML will live up to your hopes for it:
whilst there are a number of content representation formats that it is
well suited for (3D graphics, vector graphics, business charts, UML
graphs, etc), the ones that achieve mass acceptance will surely be
corrupted by formatting markup in just the same way as HTML and Latex
are now. I'm afraid that when it comes to document processing `worse
is better'.
TeX macros are very hairy, but LaTeX defines a clean interface to them
(via \newcommand, etc.) and encourages a separation between the `ugly
stuff' that is hidden in the backroom of class files and the clean
stuff that appears in the document. It is quite easy to forbid \def
macros from appearing anywhere in a document.
the only big feature missing for LaTeX to be supported in browsers would be linking
Of course, that's rather important. That's the whole emphasis of the web, and the reason HTML is so popular. LaTeX (and TeX, for that matter) deal with the specifics of how a document looks. The web is great because it deals with content, and the connections between content (linking). We need to improve some things, but XML and a plethora of other choices are better steps than TeX/LaTeX.
One of the great things about HTML (there aren't many) is the way that good HTML is display independant... IE, Opera, Mozilla may each display a page in different ways that are still consistent with the HTML. LaTeX doesn't suffer that variability very well... this is both a blessing and a curse, tho. It has great applications in handicapped and language independant viewing, but it gives typesetters headaches.
There are too many negative tradeoffs to focus on LaTeX. Focus on some other SGML derivative for a while and get the net's metadata up to speed; then go back and play with the next gen formatting tools.
XML isn't the document format itself... it's a meta-format.
Simply structuring, not layout or display in any way....
you then use XSL or XSLT to convert you happy content into whatever form you want...
You can mess with your content, it's contextual structure, and it's layout, all seperately..
Old truckers never die, they just get a new peterbilt
- Availability of a client that supports it.
- A killer app - some need that it fills sufficiently better than HTML that will get people to use it.
- Momentum - enough people using it on the Web that it gets maintained and enhanced.
As several people have pointed out, the first two conditions were already met at the time HTML was created. LaTeX has always done a better job at two things. First, it produces much better looking output for several types of content because of the underlying TeX model for composing pages. Get the TeXbook and read about boxes and glue. I learned a great deal about the inherent issues involved in typesetting from that book. Second, LaTeX in particular has always provided a clear separation of content from presentation. HTML has relentlessly driven towards blurring that distinction as it is generally used. That leads me to the third condition. LaTeX is used primarily for printed presentation. HTML is used primarily for online hypertext browsing. Even though the audiences overlap, the tasks involved are different. However, I plan to download a TeX/LaTeX plugin.The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Doing this in Docbook is incredibly difficult, because you have to modify the DTD and then all the stylesheets to add new XML tags. You could write your own stylesheet, but Docbook is huge
Of course, it would be nice if there was a wysiwig editor for either of these two. I hate them, but it's the only way to get acceptance. And yes, I know of LyX, but it's interface needs work, and I think it's confusing for the general user.
http://www.naildrivin5.com/davec
Indeed. Perhaps LaTeX should be examined, not as a replacement for HTML, but for Acrobat.
And the brethren went away edified.
It shows they don't get it. XML (and friends) is a more rigorous language than HTML, and tends to be much harder to hand code.
The whole point of XML is it is a method of exchanging data unambiguously, primarily between computers. It will need good authoring tools to support it. The days when you can just crank up your favourite editor, and hack away without any regard for the syntax of the language you're using are going. Mathematicians, at least, should be able to appreciate that rigour is a good thing in the end.
pure HTML 4.0 is a nightmare to code by hand
I wish to take issue with that. It's not all that bad; I do it a lot. Granted, editors (always raw, never wysiwyg) can make it a bit easier, but coding by hand is not nightmarishly difficult. I do it often both for my school's online paper and for my perosnal webpage (as well as just about anything else...). To me it provides the optimum in control over the code. The only major benefit I can see an editor having is "syntax highlighting," so that I can easily distinguish tags and text. MDI sometimes makes life easier, as well. And an editor certainly helps in ColdFusion, where I can never remember syntax.
Maybe I misinterpreted what you meant by that. Or else we just disagree.
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
What you are really describing I think is lack of alternatives, not "inertia." Right now, web browsers don't read LaTeX. Hence, people don't write webpages in LaTeX. Given that the only important web browser is IE, and IE has no incentive to support LaTeX, this is likely to remain the case. However, if it were to support LaTeX, for some bizarre unknown reason, then webdesigners would be able to write in whichever pleased them. If LaTeX made things as easy as you claim (I haven't played with it much yet, so I can't really say one way or the other), then new webdesigners would learn LaTeX, and HTML would die out as existing designers retired, changed fields, or decided to get with the times and learn LaTeX for themselves. Inertia doesn't really apply to situations where two standards are perfectly compatible with each other (in the sense that, one web browser will view pages of either type).
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
There is a fundamental difference between LaTeX and HTML. LaTeX, a layout language, describes a document in terms of how it should be viewed. HTML describes a document in terms of a hierarchy which is interpretted by a browser. How many web sites outhere give a damn about hierarchy or the almighty goal of hypertext. The fact is HTML is usually used as a layout languag, and for that purpose it stinks.
It also stinks as a markup language, but it will be constantly improved and refined as time goes on..
XML is a language for describing a markup language, such as XHTML. XML is god at this. Last summer I worked on a project that involved creating an an XML defined lanuage for representing ancient music manuscripts. However, XML has little advantage over HTML in terms of layout. Layout is always in the hands of the interpreter.
Is not simple though. I couldn't see the average graphics designer learning to code in it. Thanks to macros and variables Tex is more than a markup like its also a Turing complete programming language, though is almost never used that way. The print quality is wonderful. Its such a downgrade to be writing stuff in even the todays best word processors, you never match the quality of the automatically constructed fonts that Metafont provides. Need a gothic Aleph in 600dpi, it will be constructed on the fly. Finally Donald Knuth did literally write the book on computer science. Yes I love Latex more than a german fetishist ever could. IBM alphaworks did a believe construct a brower for LaTex some three years ago. It was called something like techworks. But it never caught on and I wouldn't expect it to now. Its doesn't have the bitmaps graphics porn appeal or crappy banner adverts, and just wouldn't be marketable on todays internet.
But just try writing the Einstein field equations in HTML. no, well here it is in Tex.
$$ G^{\mu\nu} - \Lambda g^{\mu\nu} = 8\pi T^{\mu\nu} $$
pure HTML 4.0 is a nightmare to code by hand ...
Ever typed a large document in Latex and then you got all kinds of 'syntax errors'... HTML will be invisible within a year or so. Programs are much better in typing correct HTML or latex than any human. And I find HTML a zillion times more friendlier to create than Latex. I'm sorry.
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
All that shows is that people have unreasonable expectations for HTML. It was never intended for hyper-precise description of the layout of the material. If you use it the way that it was really indended to be used, i.e. to make an acceptable layout from content descriptive markup, it is quite capable of doing a good job. It is even quite possible to make nice looking, artistically designed pages that way without using incredibly elaborate formatting. It's when people fight against the intent of the format and try to use it as a page description language that they start having to bend, fold, spindle, staple, and mutilate it. Hint: if your page expects the browser window to be a particular size, so that it won't fit if it's 10% too narrow or has an unattractive white gutter if it's 10% too wide, you're doing something wrong.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
There is an XML/SGML alternative to LaTeX. It is already used by LinuxDoc and it is called DocBook.
This XML/SGML solution will not give you power to specify exact inches/cm like LaTeX but the goal is to tag everything to use with stylesheets. With the use of MathML, one can get the formula writing powers of LaTeX.
Alot of work has been done by Norman Walsh and he has some nice stylesheets for making slides and even a website.
This is not for the person interested in flashy webpages, but for people interested in using the power of XML to document anything.
If you are working with writing technical documentation this is something that is worth looking into.
alfadir
--
"A witty quote proves nothing." - Signature Etiquette
it's not just for fetishes anymore...
This
I should really have drawn the diagram with SGML and XML up one level:
Yes, I'm being anal, but it's like the six-fingered man says, "Remember, this is for posterity."That's probably true, and it is significant. The main reason XML exists is because we've done such a poor job implementing SGML, in part because parsing it is a non-trivial task. More important is the complexity of the system. Displaying HTML in a web browser is simpler than rendering a LaTeX document.
LaTeX output looks ... better than HTML output
In terms of flexibility and output quality, it's more fair to compare LaTeX to XML transformed with XSL and rendered with CSS or FO to an output format like PDF. The latter is probably more complex in the end, but it is more flexible. The main advantage of *ML may be that it revolves around the wildly popular notion of linking.
The good news for all involved is that there's nothing stopping someone from incorporating TeX into the back end of a CSS or FO processor. It's just a Small Matter of Programming.
Years from now a student may still amuse himself by typing 1134 into a calculator and turning it upside down. It is not to him that the calculator designer answers.
Netscape started HTML down the path: <blink>, forms, frames, JavaScript. The cross-platform platform that inspired Sun and scared Microsoft. Meanwhile, you can continue to write the simple documents for which HTML was designed. Don't let a million web page designers persuade you to use an invisible pixel or consult a browser compatibility chart.
As DTDs like DocBook mature, use them in the same spirit. CSS and XSL will catch up and your documents will be waiting, if they are worth anything.
I'm not a typical creator of electronic content, but I think my problems are pretty typical. Consider, for example, an online newsletter that is updated continuously. Or a novel that's delivered to an editor electronically -- but comes back as hard copy, covered with red marks and yellow slips. These kinds of situations are very common, yet are poorly supported by edocument technology.
I'm not a TeX wonk, so I can't give really critique LaTex, or its ability to structure docs. I'll just take it as a given that LaTex is absolutely whiz-bang at providing a good set of organizational conventions.
But that doesn't matter. I've worked with more document formats than than most people have heard of, including TROFF (half a dozen macro packages, including one I wrote myself), HTML, RTF, FrameMaker (both native and MIF)... One lesson is clear to me: don't mix structure ("markup" is the current buzzword) with presentation in a single format. At best, you'll get a lot of embedded typesetting information that's profoundly denormalized and thus impossible to maintain. But what usually happens is that writers use the presentation features and ignore the structure features, because it's easier to use features you can actually see.
For that reason alone, TeX is a bad markup format because it's a very good presentation format.
"Perfect" is a relative term. TeX, like any other app, is good at some things and bad at others. The perfect app is the one that does exactly what you need it to do. I hope you don't need to do the same thing every day! And everybody just loves browsing PDF files, I especially enjoy docs with 4 colums per virtual page and lots of embedded graphics. Be sure to make those illustrations as complicated as you can, so each one takes 5 minutes to render! No, he mentioned HTML to LaTeX. Since his gripe is the limitations of HTML, a LaTeX to HTML filter wouldn't do him much good. Such a monster would have all the limitations of HTML! Assuming it worked perfectly -- format converters are very hard to write. I don't want a Holy Grail. I just want a basic coffe cup that doesn't leak. TeX is a sophisticated app that attacks problems most web writers just don't care about.__________________
Shameless plug:
If you had looked at IBM's WebSphere Transcoding Publisher (AIX, Sun, NT/2000, SuSE/RedHat/TurboLinux/Caldera) you'd have saved yourself the trouble of moving to xhtml... the product runs at your server, or wireless access point, and translates code, (transcodes) html to wireless device acceptable code on the fly.
It also resizes images, converts images to text links, changes image format from gif to jpeg to bmp and back, color to monochrome, and can convert tables to lists, or perform text replacement for any element of the page.
kind of a swiss army knife that would have saved you the effort, because it can recode for any type of wireless device you have, and future ones as well.
good on you for being forward thinking, tho...
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Cynicism aside, they are a big piece of the market. and so I do not think it would make much traction.
even if everyone else who had two brain cells (raise your hands please) decided that this was a Really Good Idea (tm).
This can't be something any more difficult than getting the world to change operating systems, y'know?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
HTML is better because if we just used LaTeX, every web page would look like a technical paper. There would be too many hacks into the layout control of LaTeX to add flexibility (to make wacky websites), and it would be a much bigger mess than HTML right now. I love the look of LaTeX when I write internal documents (windows word uses cower under its elegance), but considering the messy evolution of HTML, I'd hate to see the mess they'd make of LaTeX.
---
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I recall seeing a few years ago (on IBM's Alphworks site??) the "TechExplorer" browser plugin, which accepts and displays a large subset of Latex macros. But remember the old mantra: HTML as an SGML application marks structure not appearance. Granted, it allows only a relatively small set of content elements (e.g. headings, text, multimedia, etc.)--that's why there is all the brouhaha around XML (and its derivatives) as a more flexible, extensible markup for applications where the full generality of SGML's structure definition is not needed.
\usepackage{hyperref}
I used LaTEX to write my entire thesis, among other things. I used/use it extensively to do many different things. Once you get used to it, it is a fine markup language; however, the thing I think would have to be addressed from the browser standpoint is the compilation factor. Short docs/uncomplicated docs are little to no problem. Larger docs can be, though. Just a thought. I like using LaTEX, admire it greatly, and know it saved my ass when I was writing my thesis. I would truly like to see it used on the web, too. Let's hope this spawns a little interest.
legweak --"a book is like a leg, only it doesn't bleed as much when you stab it with a knife." --sum yung guy
I don't have a lot of knowledge about LaTeX, but how good is it at translating to a text-only format?
One of the benefits of HTML and its 'ability' to define structure rather than pixel-perfect layout is that it people who can't see that layout (for example, the blind, visually impared and Lynx users)
Do most think these people are in such a small minority that they're not important when defining a new data format for the most popular service on the Internet? (I'm genuinely interested, not just asking to expect the response 'well you should')
LaTeX is a wonderful way of expressing mathematical notions and is the defacto standard amoung mathematicians. Once you know TeX, using something else is a real downer, from the elegance, portability and functionality standpoints.
Unfortunately for the more mathematical amoung us, LaTeX will never/has not caught on as a competitor to HTML, largely because so little of the web needs precise mathematical notation.
A few years ago, in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, an article appeared about the promise of MathML. All the research mathematicians I know had the same reaction to the article, which was: "It took 40 lines of code to express x^2+4x=0? Is this some kind of joke?" (see the article in PDF, which was rosy about MathML and seemed to think that 40 lines of code was reasonable for that...) Mozilla supports MathML but MathML has not caught on with mathematicians and will not budge anyone away from TeX. People post their preprints in TeX, journals and conferences want articles in TeX, and it is the most reasonable way of exchanging mathematical papers.
It would be nice if TeX were more widely used, but its role is different than HTML. TeX is optimized for typesetting documents that have significant mathematical structure and though it can take a while to render something complicated in TeX, the page layout will be gorgeous. HTML or its replacements need to be quickly rendered by the browser and only very rarely have the need to use mathematical expressions.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
That is incorrect. You are confusing TeX (which is, to a large extent, a type-setting programming language), and LaTeX which is a document description language implemented on top of TeX. In LaTeX I only describe the logical structure of my content, and leave the presentation details to so-called "document classes" ("article", "thesis", "book", "slides", etc) which take care of margins, font sizes and weights, and other trivialities.
Actually... that's also how I write my HTML. A good mix of HTML+CSS2 is remarkably like using LaTeX. And as you point out, once we move to something as general as XSLT (which allows for pretty much arbitrary transformation of XML for presentation purposes), at least the spirit of the LaTeX experience, if not the syntax, will carry over onto the WWW.
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On the contrary, PDF has solved a great many of the problems that used to plague portable document publishing. It provides precise control over layout and display of documents. It relies on PostScript, so the quality of its displayed and printed output is potentially very high. Need I mention its portable. The only two problems with PDF, both minor, are its speed (PDFs do take awhile to render, at least on my system) and the sort of fascist content/copyright-control mechanisms embedded into the format. The latter really isn't even a weakness, however; it's more me editorializing. Also support for hypertext could be better. Most people find PDF an attractive and secure means for distributing their documents. I'm interested to know what makes you hate it.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
This seems to me like it would be going the wrong way. With latex, you are still worried about laying out your document, I was under the impression that the next big thing was to worry about describing your document, and using a translator (ala xslt...)
of course, I could be wrong...
/ZL
Using TeX for typesetting is a pretty good idea, printable media can be easily broken down into sets of mathematical relations. Plain white paper has specific metrics and so does glossy paper and so on. Digital media however is subject to a fuckload of different potentialities. This is one of the reasons HTML came about in the first place. It originally didn't give a shit about the display of the information it just provided the information for display which is translated and rendered by the browser. This is exactly why HTML can be viewed with both Lynx and Netscape if you don't bother with styling shit. Markup languages are really good for this purpose; they are designed to convey information and let something else decide how its going to look. LaTeX and PostScript and the like take the opposite appraoch and relate the information to display elements. This is a shitty document model and a pretty intensive way to display information. Besides the fact you'd lock content and style into the same code you end up losing all of the functionality of the Hyper- prefix. Not only does HTML leave the displaying of content up to an external element it VERY easily connects bits of information. People don't like typing/copying URLs often. Is is much more time efficent to type out the URL's one time (at page creation) then it is to type them out every single fucking time the page is accessed.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
No.
And that's not what the person was talking about: ... I wondered why it couldn't be turned into the next standard for online documents
To me, this is looking for a replacement for .PDF files, text files, and technical papers. I have no doubt that my favorite browser will support this easily, but the plug in system for most browsers is seriously broken, and adding mime types to them is a major effort. Due to this, new file formats like fractally compressed images (yes, I know the licensing problems hurt them as well) can't "break in", and the "Browser" has become painfully a http & html only program, plus a few things like http & text and http & image (Plus Flash, PDF, and bad Java implementations). New protocols aren't easily added without the upgrade of the monolithic browser, and old ones (like ftp://, gopher://, telnet:// or esoteric ones like tv://) are not supported well, or at all.
So, yes: LaTeX with its general descriptive tags would make an excellent markup language for papers, and no, it's not likely to be adopted.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
(pure HTML 4.0 is a nightmare to code by hand)
what planet are you from? planet FrontPage?
XML with stylesheets gives you much of what you get from LaTeX: ability to define new elements, like, say, 'abstract', and how they should be presented. Defining the structure of the document and indexing are possible too.
Coding HTML 4 by hand is hard; XHTML is worse. That's in the past for the web. Use a decent editor - even if it only keeps the tags matched for you. Autogenerate it from LaTeX if you like.
Page layout is tricky: well yes, that's not what HTML is designed for. For now, use CSS. In the future XSL:FO. Mathematics: simple, use MathML.
My recommendation would be you go find a decent introductory book on XML technologies and read up about them. Or take a good look at the W3C site. There's a whole wealth of stuff out there.
<confession>Okay, I don't actually know LaTeX, so there's a very good chance I'm about to look stupid...</confession>
...but isn't LaTeX designed for print? Fixed page size, for visual reading only. Does it address scalability for different display sizes, from 21" monitors to PDAs? Does it support semantic tagging for accessibility support? If not, it can't and shouldn't replace xhtml.
Might be nice to replace PDF as a web-distributable print-quality format, though. I hate PDFs.
By reading back comments I understand most people don't understand what would be the real point of replacing HTML by Latex. Here I explain : By "Pure HTML 4.0", I mean being up to 4.0 standards. If you read up HTML 4.0 documentation carefully, you will undoubtely notice 99% of tags and attributes we used to code in version 3.x are marked "deprecated". Pure 4.0 structure is very heavy to handle as there are a lot of divisions and styles to define even before typing a single character. In comparison, all classes are already defined with Latex and coding style looks much more like HTML 3.x style, even simpler. Also, as many pointed out, Latex is mostly device-independent, unlike HTML which looks very different from browser to browser due to the way it is interpreted. There is no way to publish a professional document online using HTML whenever you need some strict pagination parameters because the browser systematically alter them. Unlike many seem to believe, Latex parsing is very fast, in fact mostly as fast as HTML since it is compiled. All browsers interpret HTML directly to screen and have to redraw content several times. Although it is supposed to give an impression of speed, it is rather annoying. To those believing Latex is hard to learn, I answer all tags used in HTML have an *simpler* equivalent in Latex. Also, many features of Latex are just automatic, such as text justification, or are handled through standard classes one just have to load at the beginning of the document. Finally, since HTML to Latex conversion is already commonplace through a simple utility, it would not break compatibility. People could still code in HTML if they want. But Latex browsers would undoubtely have an extra. Ultimately, it would turn out being as attractive to support Latex than Shockwave. In my humble opinion, shortly HTML standards will run out of control and become a language much less convenient that it is now simply because it was not created to handle whatever tasks engineers of the web intend to make it run (what explains the drastic changes in 4.0 standards). At least Latex is a most solid and clean architecture, portable, simple to learn and to port to and from, and so on.
I have a fondness for TeX: its hyphenation and justification are still top notch. I'd like to see its algorithms incorporated into the back end of a CSS or FO processor. Here's how I'd relate some of the current markup languages:
Obviously, the lines blur. For example, the above diagram was written in Slashdot's subset of HTML, so it contains lots of and <br>--very presentational. Also, the diagram doesn't explicitly mention screen-based or interactive output media, which are very important.H1 -- \chapter /I - emphtext /B - textbftest
H2 -- \secion
etc
and list type thingies:
LI - \item
UL - \begin{enumerate}
and everyones favories highlights:
I
B
etc... etc...
In most cases the differences are trivial, seeming to indicate that, at first approximation, translating between these two systems should not prove too difficult.
There are translation programs that use these similarities, but in order to exploit the richness of the LaTeX language as compared to HTML (especially , which has no support for tables or mathematics), an ad hoc approach has to be adopted. To handle correctly LaTeX commands that have no equivalent in HTML , such elements can either be transformed into bitmap or pictures (an approach taken by LaTeX2HTML ), or the user can specify how the given element should be handled in the target language.
Accordingly, the migration would be simple if some steps were taken to convert those tables and equations... but good luck getting people to switch until the big gorillas get behind it
First, I'm beginning to get into TeX. I don't know what LaTeX offers that plain old TeX doesn't, or vice versa, but I feel I can discuss this with a bit of intelligence.
One of the biggest barriers to web-standardom is the complexity of the formatting language. I know HTML (I'm quite proficient in it--who isn't?), and I'm beginning to see TeX. TeX has more commands, and many of them are far less intuitive than HTML tags (<bold> is pretty obvious). Most webmasters, particularly busy commercial ones, won't want to take the time to learn TeX. Therefore, while it may be a published standard, it will never be the de facto standard.
The second problem is target applications. TeX is a formatting system. It gives the user fine-grained control of textual layout and appearance. HTML is a classification system. It gives the user the ability to group text according to form and function.
HTML assumes (correctly) that the user knows nothing about how documents appear at the viewing end. What looks excellent on letter-sized paper, for example, looks terrible on A4-sized paper--words run off the page, margins are too small, lines are pressed together. All HTML does is tell the viewer how text should be classified--letting the viewer decide how to display those words. After all, nobody better understands how this information is being viewed than the viewer himself (itself).
TeX, on the other hand, assumes (correctly) that the user knows exactly how documents appear at the viewing end. If you know that you are printing to letter-sized paper, it is very easy to tune the placement and appearance of text on your page to produce an optimal layout--one that is aesthetically and functionally pleasing. The problem with the World Wide Web is that we aren't all viewing things on letter-sized paper. My Netscape window dimensions are 845x960 pixels; I can't believe anybody else has exactly that size window. Even if they did, it is unlikely that their window widgets (borders, titles) are the same, so the viewing area is different. I can make things look great in my window, but in anybody else's window, the same document would not look optimal.
This is precisely why TeX will never make it as a web standard. Nobody likes to scroll in a weird fashion to read documents, or have small text which can't be enlarged (or which screws up formatting if enlarged). TeX is only good when the document producer controls how the viewers are presented the data. And that is impossible on the World Wide Web.
I do not belong in the spam.redirect.de domain.
Unfortunately, because of it's TeX heritage, the way LaTeX describes styles and macros is pretty clunky. Underneath the covers, it's more like a machine language, with numbered registers, side-effects, and odd processing hooks. XML/XSL is probably a better choice: it's more formally defined than LaTeX. The XSL transformation model is easier to understand and more predictable to most people.
The biggest problem with XML in my view is cosmetic: it's a pain to type. XSL is somewhat more limited than LaTeX when it comes to specifying physical page layout in a device-independent way, but those limitations probably can be overcome in the long run, and they don't matter that much on the web: for physical layout on the web, XSL has most of what you need.
I think XML and LaTeX are slowly growing together anyway. LaTeX 3 will probably have some built-in XML support. There are already several packages that can go from XML to LaTeX and from LaTeX to XML. In the long run, we may see that LaTeX will become an alternative input syntax for XML and that TeX/LaTeX will be used more and more for producing actual printed representations of XML documents.
You can find lots of related links here.
Eight years of insane growth has pushed HTML into what can only be called an "interface language." Websites aren't documents anymore. They are forms, banners, toolbars, indexes, and all sorts of non-HTML stuff taped together to create an "information interface." That doesn't map well to the LaTeX as it is. LaTeX is overkill for somethings (pagination, text flow layout) and is completely missing other things (forms).
I like LaTeX, but it won't work for websites.
Uh, TeX isn't going to replace HTML and XML as a web standard. Ever. Apart from math and certain other scientific notation, it is not easier to work with or more readable than SGML-based languages. Nor is it in any meaningful way "more scriptable". Nor does it have a decent object model. Nor, now that we're finally moving into XML, is it especially "more" extensible. CSS and XSL stylesheets are more elegant than TeX macros. TeX isn't paticularly display-independent, seeing as it's designed for typesetting. Many of its core commands are for precise layout, not semantic markup.
For another thing, most web pages are at least in part machine generated these days. Between imports from WYSIWYG text editors, templating systems with simplified HTML input, web publishing platforms, databases and so forth, the winning language is the one that programmers can write generators for more easily. HTML wins here, and XML pretty much wraps it up, with nice high-level APIs for generating them from every programming language from RPG and LotusScript to Perl, VB, C++ and Java. As for generating TeX, I think there are some Perl classes and maybe if you rip through the code for LyX you could patch something together for C.
I daresay, Microsoft's XML representations of Word documents have a better shot at supplanting HTML than TeX does, and that's not exactly likely.
Next, as for viewing TeX in a web browser: ou already can, at least on certain platforms. IBM has a plugin for Win32 (ant least) caled TechXplorer or some such. It's been around for years. It renders TeX just fine for the several hundred scientists and mathematicians who want to do such things. If you're curious, sniff around their Alphaworks site.
Good grief.
See the HyperTeX FAQ for details.
I like LaTeX's ability to separate semantic structure from layout logic, but any language that will allow style sheets can do the same thing, including HTML4. Also, TeX has a Turing-complete macro language, which I tend to dislike in a document description language. So while I like some aspects of this idea, I can't altogether support it.
--
Some keywords for the NSA in the Lord of the Rings universe: One Ring bind find Sauron quest Nazgul freedom
Math ML
But I still think it is a pity that people insist HTML should be a powerful page layout tool. TeX is pretty anal in its requirement that page layout be predictable, which is cool for paper documents but way uncool for web pages. When I resize my web browser to show a long, narrow page, I'd appreciate it if the text flowed in such a way that the page would still be legible. This is already broken in a lot of web pages that insist on specifying table widths in pixels or using images to enforce a certain size, but TeX is even more inflexible in allowing the user to determine what his screen should look like.
Putting the user in control was one of the advantages of HTML in the old days. These days, one is glad if windows full of ads aren't popping up left, right and center, and obviously there must be someone around who thinks that is somehow a good idea...
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
The TechExplorer mentioned has kept up with the times. The plug-in browses TeX, LaTeX, and MathML documents in Netscape and IE. Yet I seriously doubt that any of these three will triumph as the final answer... There is little overlap... or should I say mathematically, "LCD(LaTeX,MathML) << Need". ;-)
Many LaTeX conventions are great for typing up formula descriptions conversationally. Netscape 6 does a bit of (optional) automatic conversion, like smilies, carets-to-superscripts and underscores-to-subscripts, and this is but a step toward what what is needed in places like sci.math and the web.
LaTeX PROs
- A few ASCII keystrokes can compose well-balanced formulae.
- A variety of fonts conventional to math are readily deployed.
- Formulae can be expressed inline with text or in their full glory 'equation mode.'
LaTeX CONsMathML PROs
- It adds a LOT of missing pieces to HTML that are needed in Math.
- It provides some very abstracted content that could be cut-and-pasted into powerful (XML-based?) applications.
MathML CONsIdeally we should get be able to start with a lightweight comprimise, but extensible by fonts and stylesheets that are readable to all clients/browsers. Neither format offers this at present. Hopefully, programmers will turn to cultures like sci.math to see how they converse, and gleen the best of latex AND HTML.
The problem with latex on the web is that there already is a nice platform for those that wish to completely control page layout: Acrobat. And it has the advantage of playing nicely with mainstream word processors.
This is a rather naive question- have you used LaTeX at all? I say this as a dedicated LaTeX user: LaTeX just isn't suited for web applications for a huge number of reasons.
First of all, you say HTML is a nightmare to code in. Perhaps if you are trying to go all the way with CSS, sophisticated visual layout, and so fourth, but I can knock out a simple, standards-compliant web page in 15-20 minutes. Not a pretty one, but a functional one. I can do that with LaTeX, but only with a library of templates which I have built up over the years. You just can't do LaTeX quick-and-dirty. It's not designed for it.
Second, there is the issue of visual formatting. LaTeX and HTML both, in theory, are based on the principle of content-based markup- you specify the data in content terms, and the browser/LaTeX engine determines how best to format it for display. Anyone who has ever used either of these languages knows that this is a total lie, especially for HTML. All professional HTML work centers on various hacks to achieve direct visual formatting of the page, something which HTML is fortunately quite amentable to. LaTeX, on the other hand, is a huge pain in the ass if you're trying to control the look and layout of a document- the LaTeX engine knows what's best , and it's sure as hell not going to take advice from you! You can do visual formatting the proper way, by redefining commands and LaTeX variables to get LaTeX to understand the visual format you are looking for. However, this is an enormous time outlay, and is completely impractical for anything less than, say, a book.
More fundamentally, LaTeX and HTML, although they were originally concieved for similar purposes (content markup for visual display of academic papers), have evolved in radically different directions. While LaTeX has stuck pretty close to that original intent, HTML has become almost a GUI specification language, with all kinds of capabilities which LaTeX simply doesn't have. The proof is in the pudding: Show me a LaTeX version of the Amazon page. Or the Slashdot main page. Even ignoring the issues like linking that you mention, it is for all practical purposes impossible. It would require literally weeks of dedicated LaTeX hacking, and the result would be a horrific kludge. LaTeX is, and is likely to remain, a language for typesetting documents for the purpose of conventional, dead-tree publication. Any other application of it would be a gross violation of a fundamental principle of hacking: the right tools for the right job.
In short, LaTeX and HTML have only their theoretical conception in common. For all practical intents and purposes they are so vastly different that using LaTeX as a general web language is inconceiveable. There is, however, a new language emerging which promises to clean up the blurred boundaries of content and visual formatting, and get rid of the most flagrant horrors of HTML. If you want to see an HTML alternative, go look into XML.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" -Salvor Hardin
For example, I have a LaTeX macro which will quote and cite from a source in the margin of my document. The Web has no concept of a margin. Sure, I could make Netscape 4.76 lay out a web page as if it were a technical paper, but why should I have to "flip pages" on the Web? And what if I want to read this super LaTeX-enabled web page in lynx? on my Visor? on my cell phone? with a screen reader?
Sure, you can simulate a lot of physical markup items with style sheets, but that's not the point. The point is, HTML is designed to embellish text with simple, logical markup; one of HTML's greatest strengths is that it can be rendered faithfully by a variety of different tools with myriad differences in capability. LaTeX, OTOH, is designed to target one medium: a DVI file which is tied to a particular page size. So you have some logical markup, but in general a lot of the "logic" is tied to physical realities of the page. (how many times have you typed \vspace{1.0cm}, for -- albeit a trivial -- example?)
In addition, LaTeX doesn't lend itself to interpreting -- the more powerful features, like indexing, citations, and TOCs all require multiple passes. Add to this that it's a LOT harder to parse and (to be honest) to write than semi-valid HTML, and it's just not a viable standard. The final nail is inertia. The web is based on HTML, and it has for a long time. People are OK with extending HTML in bizarre ways to give them an approximation of TeX-like control over their document's appearance, so there's no room for a better, cleaner language. :-)
~wog
LaTeX (based on TeX) is a fine typographic markup language. That is, it is specifically designed for describing pages of text in a elegant fashion.
SGML is a markup language designed to describe a document's contents, not layout. The layout of an SGML document is determined by a stylesheet.
HTML, was based upon SGML because the idea behind HTML was not to design a page description language, but a document description language. A language that describes the elements of a document and not how they are to be displayed on the screen or be printed. Unfortunately thanks to the commercial interests of Netscape and Microsoft, it failed to seperate layout and content.
XML is an attempt to simplify SGML, eliminating the more esoteric features. XML documents do not describe layout, but rely upon Stylesheets to determine how a page is layed out. This proves superior to LaTeX because a seperation between content and layout can be made.
The idea is, you can mark up data with XML, and then using a stylesheet, change how it is presented to the user. Even more impressive, the content's presentation (or stylesheet) can be modified dynamically through scripting.
XHTML is HTML represented in terms of HTML, it is the future, and as time progresses (we can hope) that XML and Stylesheets will eventually replace HTML.
LaTeX is not the answer for HTML. The goals of LaTeX is for the final presentation to be printed pages. LaTeX does a splendid job of that. The goal of XML is data-description. Add stylesheets and you have the means to present content in many ways.
XML is the replacement for HTML. XHTML is the gateway from HTML to XML.
Adding the new feature should take "only a few more weeks" according to them team, although there were suggestions that LaTeX support would also be added to the mail client, futher delaying the browsers release. Another programmer noted that "we might also want to make this LaTeX thing skinable".
Users waiting for Mozilla to release seemed suprisingly unsurprised by the announcement, although one slashdot reader was heard to say "it's a pity - i might have even used mozilla if IE crashed."
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