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."

Comments

LaTeX (& TeX) are programs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Latex is a typesetting program that converts an appropriately formatted file to a device independent format that is in turn converted to a printer format of your choice (as long as its postscript) by dvips. Originally developed by an academic for academics to write exam papers (among others) it has expanded greatly to ve able to produce a number of formats books, newspapers, slides, reports, articles, letters etc.

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.

One step sideways

[Per Abrahamsen]

> I have to use LaTeX in my EE classes, and I
> 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&lt/blah&gt.

> 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 .tex code > after you type it in Emacs.

Just like with HTML, this depends on the software you use.

This is all the wrong approach

[spitzak]

It should be obvious by now that the vast majority of creators of web pages do not want document formatting, they want precise descriptions of the image. The standards organizations have to realize this, and realize that any document formatter will be bastardized by the users and the implementors (like MicroSoft and Netscape) to make it into a layout language.

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:

• Push a rectangle. A rectangle is specified with dimensions that can be in pixels, or in percentages of the enclosing rectangle's size, or relative to the bottom of the current text. When the page starts the rectangle is equal to the browser window.
• Pop back to the previous rectangle, leaving the text position below it.
• Ascii (or UTF-8 text now) is formatted into the width of the current rectangle (if too big it will go out the bottom). There are no special characters so quoting is never needed. Paragraph breaks are indicated by ^J followed by another ^J or whitespace. There are imbedded commands but they are introduced with control characters, perhaps ^[command^].
• Commands to change the font by name (browser is free to substitute another font), set the size (given as pixel line spacing), color, etc.
• Simple graphics, like rectangles and polygons, filled with solid color or tiled images, and clipped to the current rectangle.
• Images exactly the same as HTML does them (this is the only thing they got right!)
• A command to include the contents of another document here.

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.

Re:This is all the wrong approach

[MikeBabcock]

Use a Postscript plugin.

No, seriously, HTML was not intended for layout, and that's a good thing. Why? It was to replace Gopher to some degree -- to make linkable documents of mostly text.

When we got past that point, we should have used a new format for laid-out documents that was still delivered by HTTP (which itself sucks).

Re:XHTML

[doomy]

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.
--

Re:Hey Gromer

[Gromer]

Hee-hee : ) Cute. I'll be really amused if NiM sees this. (I once got him in a slashdot discussion about gun control)

Yeah, a get-together would be awesome- I miss all you guys, and since Neglekt went down I haven't really been able to keep in touch.

My sense of propriety is kicking in, however, so why don't we move this to e-mail before the trolls take notice... My e-mail address is listed in my /. info. Drop me a line!

Re:Not a chance

[Gromer]

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).

Re:LaTeX

[GiMP]

>I don't understand why PDF still exists - let alone latex :)

Try writing a novel in Microsoft World, sure you could do it.. I'm sure most authors do. Now try writing it in LaTeX, providing you know it well enough, you will never go back.

It is believed by many to be the next best thing to hand-typesetting. Mathmatical formulas may be clearly represented. It is free and open.

With LaTeX, "The user only needs to learn a few easy-to-understand commands which specify the logical structure of a document. They almost never need to tinker with the actual layout of the document"

Footnotes, Endnotes, Table of contents, etc are easily generated... in WYSIWYG editors like Word, this must be hand-produced.

What is considered reasons not to use LaTeX (from the Not So Short Indtruction to LaTeX2e manual by Tobias Oetiker):
* it does not work well for people who have sold their souls...
* design of a new layout is difficult and takes some time.. (slated for next major version)
* It is very hard to write unstructured and disorganized documents
* Your hamster might, dispite some encouraging first steps, never be able to fully grasp the concept of Logical Markup.

PDF doesn't seem to be much furter off, but closed. Of course, adobe managed to make easy to use tools for the Windows platform for PDF, which is why it is more common. It is not uncommon for Professors at institutions to provide class slides in postscript, dvi, or pdf.

LaTeX can be used for more than books, slides can be done as well. I have always said... "It is a shame that linux doesn't have any tools as powerful as powerpoint". True, LaTeX may not allow for the dynamic features available in powerpoint, but LaTeX probally would fair just as well as PowerPoint on static slides. (Haven't personally tried though)

LaTeX is awesome, and has a purpose. I do not think that LaTeX should or will ever replace HTML.. The difficult thing with HTML is that a lot of people do not have standards compliant browsers. Sure, you could use that imagemap.. or you can use a lot of tables and confusing use of tables. It is more socially acceptable to use the table.. when was the last time you saw an imagemap ? Nobody does them, but they would save a hellva-lot of time for some applications.
(in many of these instances, the resulting filesize is proballly smaller with the table).

If every brower supported HTML 4 perfectly and efficently, it wouldn't be such a big deal.

this misses the point

[woggo]

Indeed. Perhaps LaTeX should be examined, not as a replacement for HTML, but for Acrobat.

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

Re:Different document paradigms

[woggo]

MusiXTeX (a descendant of MusicTeX) was best. There are now higher-level programs like Rosegarden and GNU LilyPond which will output MusiXTeX.

Good luck!

Re:XHTML

[MikeFM]

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.

Re:Gyros in your underwear causing chaffing?

[Graymalkin]

I wasn't confusing TeX and LaTeX, I was using both in terms of their object model. HTML is a good markup language as it only references or classifies information i.e.

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.

LyX! -- Re:LaTeX is the worst thing in the world.

[BitMan]

You want LyX!!!

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith

Re:Better Idea

[Gerv]

You need MathML. Already available in special nightlies of Mozilla for Windows and Linux.

Gerv

As wonderful as LaTeX is...

[Straker Skunk]

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 attach&eacute; 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)

Re:Not a chance

[Arandir]

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.

Latex vs. HTML

[the eric conspiracy]

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....

Re:Latex vs. HTML

[Shimbo]

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....

You mean like using XSL:FO to generate PDF?

Re:Heck, no!

[jilles]

Latex is a set of macros on top of a very archaic layout language called tex (its archaic because almost ayone would prefer to use the macros on top of it rather than just the core language). I suppose you could hack together a tex interpreter (I'm not aware of any though) that does what HTML does but it would be just that: a hack. It would probably be wise to create a set of webspecific macros then instead of using the latex macros which are tailored to printed documents rather than web documents.

However, the future lies in neither HTML or latex. Both tend to mix structure and layout information. Both have a fixed set of structural elements. The future lies in XML combined with separate stylesheets. The stylesheets define the layout, the XML the structure. As soon as browser developers get their act together and implement the standards in full and consistently, this could become a reality. For the mean time we can use HTML (or XHTML) in combination with stylesheets. Using IE 5 or Mozilla you can get a pretty consistent result already and this will only improve over the coming few years.

There's a nice proverb that summarizes my argument: if you have a hammer, every problem seems a nail. Latex is the proverbial hammer, web documents, IMHO, are not a suitable nail for it.

Different tools for different tasks

[Mr T]

This is kind of an old wound for me. I'm a big LaTeX and TeX fan. I still think they are one of the best ways to produce beautiful documents, sure the built in styles with Word are nice looking and Quark and Ventura ninjas can make documents that would make Gutenburg cry, but for those of us who can appriciate a pretty document but aren't gifted enough to create them TeX and LaTeX is the best thing going. If I'm building a document, and documents will never die or be replaced by the web, I usually use LaTeX for it.

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.

Re:Different document paradigms

[frantzdb]

(I even used LaTeX as an undergrad to typeset music history papers, including score examples.)

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.

Re:Never

[frantzdb]

If you havn't tried LaTeX yet, I suggest you give it a whirl. I started out with TeX only to realize that LaTeX is what is used for real-world things in my experience. LaTeX is generally much more powerful for practical things... along with doing indecies, contents pages, bibliographies, etc.

--Ben

Complexity

[gregbaker]

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.

Re:Complexity

[E-prospero]

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.

Parsing LaTeX is easier than parsing HTML; LaTeX keywords are escaped with a backslash, and keywords end with a space, or with bracket pairs to define parameters. HTML requires parsing of bra/ket (less than/greater than) pairs, and the attribute values within the first pair. Not much more difficult, but harder than parsing LaTeX.

LaTeX output looks orders of magnitude better than HTML output. It's designed to be rendered on very high DPI printed page output - the algorithm takes a lot of time with kerning, line breaking, placing of floats/diagrams, and the like. By comparison, HTML just spews text on the page. For web pages, this is a perfectly functional alternative, but make no mistake - (La)TeX does a lot more than HTML ever does.

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.

`Monetary reward' makes it sound like it's a lot more than it really is - you get a cheque for $2.56 if you find a bug in his textbooks, or $3.14 if you find a bug in TeX. It's mostly a kudos factor of having a cheque from the man.

The last reported bug in TeX was about 10 years ago (IIRC), and Knuth has declared that at the time of his death, any bug still remaining will be declared an official feature.

Russ %-)

Re:Two steps backwards

[hollow_man]

But that's besides the point. Personally, having been forced to make the output of CGIs pixelperfect I believe that everyone who uses HTML for formatting and pixelperfect layout should be shot on sight.

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

HyperTeX etc.

[rkmath]

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.

Re:cow excrement! Was: Re:Bleep! You're Disqualifi

[extrasolar]

<?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>

Re:Like LateX is easy...

[PigleT]

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?
~Tim
--
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,

LaTeX, HyperTeX, XML

[E-prospero]

The content/form separation which LaTeX provides - which the real source of power for the language - is the same power provided by a good XML DTD (like DocBook), when combined with a good cascading style sheet or XSL defnition. Of course, this relies upon the existence of browsers which implement CSS and XSL correctly.... A nice set of design tools to handle the same also would not go astray...

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

Re:This is funny!

[rbrito]

LaTeX is more of a display language, to define exactly how some text should look.

Sorry. That's not correct. In fact, it's exactly the opposite. LaTeX is not a language for editing the appearance of a document. It is deliberately a language for the writer to worry on the contents of its document.

I took the trouble and grabbed my copy of "LaTeX: A Document Preparation System", written by the author of LaTeX, Leslie Lamport. On pages 6 and 7, he writes:

Since LaTeX can't understand your prose, you must explicitly indicate the logical structure by typing special commands. The primary function of almost all the LaTeX commands that you type should be to describe the logical structure of your document. As you are writing your document, you should be concerned with its logical structure, not its visual appearance.

(I emphasized the part in the above quote).

[]s, Roger...

Re:Similaritis between LaTeX and HTML

[thogard]

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.

Better Idea

[antizeus]

The answer to the original question is "NO" for various reasons which others have already stated.

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:

<texmath&gt {\rm Ext}_n^R(M^\alpha, R) = 0 for n \ge 5 </texmath>

and have the browser react appropriately (graphical browsers render an image, text browsers output the TeX code).

Re:LaTeX

[Mr. Slippery]

No Author writes Novels using LaTeX.

Maybe, though I wouldn't be surprised if someone like Vernor Vinge or Neal Stephenson did. But I have typeset a chapbook of my poetry using LaTeX. (I didn't write the poems with LaTeX, I wrote them with a pencil, typed them up in Emacs, stuck LaTex markup in, and ran them through LaTeX2HTML for the web version.)

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

The future is XML

[Hard_Code]

...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.

Re:Linking is also available in LaTeX

[Weezul]

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).

Re:Not a chance

[Chalst]

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'.

Re:XML/XSL, not LaTeX

[Chalst]

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.

Just a few holes

[ZahrGnosis]

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.

Re:Not a chance

[lscoughlin]

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..

Required for acceptance

[dsplat]

There are three things required for any new standard to be accepted for markup on the Web:

1. Availability of a client that supports it.
2. A killer app - some need that it fills sufficiently better than HTML that will get people to use it.
3. 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.

What about Docbook?

[GusherJizmac]

Docbook might be a better choice, simply because it handles external links better. Of course, this could be added to LaTeX pretty easily. I guess the best thing about LaTeX is the macro feature. YOu can define macros like \makedef{design} and then your LaTeX code is descriptive, because you separate the formatting of "design" from the content.

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.

Re:Might be nice, but...

[leo.p]

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.


Luckily for people, HTML is already being replaced by XHTML+XML+XSLT+ECMA Script, a combination that LaTeX cannot compete with on merit.

An accurate translation of the topic's question would be:

Could LaTeX replace XHTML+XML+XSLT+ECMA, already partially supported in browsers with full support to follow sooner rather than later?

Long answer: In a world of infinite possibilities, I suppose there's a small but non zero chance that it could. Short answer: NO.

It's nice that the questioner learned LaTeX but, no offense, it would be nicer if he also spent some time reading and thinking about the content on http://www.w3.org/. I mean, the question was about the www, right?

Re:Different document paradigms

[CaptainCarrot]

Indeed. Perhaps LaTeX should be examined, not as a replacement for HTML, but for Acrobat.

Re:simplicty of LaTeX, complexity of MathML

[Shimbo]

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?"

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.

I beg to differ

[Ravagin]

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

Not at all

[Galvatron]

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).

layout vs. markup

[ironhorse]

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.

Ah the sweat smell of LaTex.

[spiro_killglance]

I rembember writing up my PhD in Latex using AmigaTex, its a wonderful typesetting languages for maths and physics and if you look at science papers you'll find even ten years after its was made, that Tex and Latex are still the defacto method of publishing scientific works.

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.

$$ G^{\mu\nu} - \Lambda g^{\mu\nu} = 8\pi T^{\mu\nu} $$

Like LateX is easy...

[Otis_INF]

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.
--

Re:Not a chance

[rgmoore]

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 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.

DocBook XML/SGML

[alfadir]

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

LaTex...

[ellem]

it's not just for fetishes anymore...

amended diagram

[_|()|\|]

Here's how I'd relate some of the current markup languages

I should really have drawn the diagram with SGML and XML up one level:

(SG|X)ML
|
HTML DocBook LaTeX
| | |
| (XSL|DSSSL) |
| | |
+---------+ |
| |
CSS |
| |
+---+---+
|
TeX
|
DVI
|
(PDF|PostScript|PCL)

Yes, I'm being anal, but it's like the six-fingered man says, "Remember, this is for posterity."

complexity of system, not syntax

[_|()|\|]

Parsing LaTeX is easier than parsing HTML

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.

3V3N 45C11 15 N0T 54F3

[_|()|\|]

the [XML DTDs] that achieve mass acceptance will surely be corrupted by formatting markup in just the same way as HTML and Latex

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.

Re:This is funny!

[fm6]

Actually, HTML (as originally conceived) is not so much display agnostic as display phobic. HTML is an SGML app, and good SGML apps are very, very careful to separate document structure and document presentation. Early web standards efforts seemed to have focused almost entirely on the structure side. This was quite logical, given the original conception of the web as a simple, distributed information base. But that's not the way the web turned out. Instead, it's a massive set of diverse applications, dominated by things like ecommerce, customer support, and multimedia. When "official" HTML failed to provide the presentation features they needed, Netscape and Microsoft went ahead and improvised. So HTML ended up trying to be both a presentation and markup language, and not doing either very well.

TeX is not the answer. TeX does address HTML's shortcomings as a presentation language, but TeX doesn't even pretend to be any good at structuring documents.

What is the answer? I wish I knew. XML will probably give us the document management power that HTML failed to supply. (I'm skeptical of XHTML, which may give us the worst of both worlds.) We still need some solid conventions for presentation (TeX might have a role to play there) and communication. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be giving that much attention.

__________________

Re:but LaTeX does

[fm6]

Hey, that's the reason LaTeX was created!
To create structured documents!

Are we using the same meaning of "structure"? I'm not talking about physical organization of page elements. Of course TeX is very good at that. But that's typesetting. When I say "structure" I'm talking about the document as a whole. I make my living dealing with large, complicated technical documents. Writing them, updating them, helping with localization, etc. I need tools that help me with these tasks. Since I don't deal with math or other non-linear languages, I don't have much need for high-end typesetting features.

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.

It isn't perfect though, I'll admit that.

"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!

To everyone who is complaining/commenting about lack of support, you can easily convert LaTeX output to a pdf file

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!

I think the author of the article also mentioned that you there are LaTeX to HTML translators.

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 doubt there will be any holy grail of document presentation and structure. You will probably have to structure documents in one format and render/convert them to a presentation format. Hey, that's how LaTeX works!

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.

__________________

Re:XHTML

[firewort]

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

well ...

[Alien54]

Microsoft doesn't own it.

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?

homogeniety

[Sebastopol]

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.


---

IBM Latex Browser

[mjdl]

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.

Linking a problem with Latex?

[marcovje]

\usepackage{hyperref}

LaTEX instead of HTML -- what a concept.

[legweak]

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.

How about people who can't see layout?

[riedquat]

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')

simplicty of LaTeX, complexity of MathML

[call -151]

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.

Re:Two steps backwards

[aleksey]

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

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.

Re:Solving the wrong problem, surely?

[drix]

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.

Re:This is funny!

[itp]

Have you used LaTeX before? Your description of it defines exactly what LaTeX is not.

For those who don't know, LaTeX lets you define structured documents, and then you apply a style across the entire document which then defines how it appears. Yes, this technology has been around for a lot longer than HTML, CSS, blah blah blah.

For example, by writing a document with sections, chapters, references, etc etc, depending on what style I choose, I might end up with a table of contents, or not, with an index, or not, with footnotes, or not, etc etc...

(For the record, you are perhaps confusing LaTeX with TeX...)

--
Ian Peters

Two steps backwards

[ZeroLogic]

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

Re:Two steps backwards

[phliar]

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...

You're wrong.

LaTeX is all about describing the semantic units of the document. You say things like \chapter{The Name of the Chapter} and \begin{quotation}This is some quoted text.\end{quotation}.

Plain TeX documents often have a lot of positioning commands (although you don't need to, and stylistically they shouldn't appear anywhere but in the "setup" part at the top so it's maintainable). In LaTeX, however, you are discouraged from using any positioning and layout commands.

The translator takes your LaTeX source and produces a DVI file that is a device independent description of all the pages. TeX/LaTeX predate HTML, and DVI predates PostScript.

TeX still has the best automatic layout engine available anywhere for any price. Only a good (human) professional typesetter can do better.

Re:Two steps backwards

[john_many_jars]

LaTeX still does not solve three basic problems with document formatting. After working with JNI to implement printing in Java (Java printing is absolutely horrid), actual font sizes vary from printer to printer. Courier 10 is different sizes on different printers--can you imagine the headache? Actual points on a page vary from printer to printer (albeit slightly) across platforms. Believe it or not, a dual boot 95/NT machine will render a document differently on the same printer with the JNI class we implemented--depending on the OS being used. The final problem is cross-platform implementation of these issues.

To suggest LaTeX or other page layout that is not as complete as postscript or pdf, is to trade the language, not the problem.

The popularity of HTML is that it is easy to learn the basics and rich enough to do very complicated formatting. Eventual HTML standards may approach TeX 3.14159 with things like MathML, Style-sheets, etc. However, there will always be vendor specific problems. For those who look at my web page, I made it in 30 minutes with vi. I do have a very good working knowledge of HTML.

XML may be a way to go. As an XML programmer, I enjoy the fact that I have lex and yacc built in with XML, though I don't like the bloat. The project UIML makes the point I am trying to make. The interface should be easy to use such that any graphic designer can use it and those of use who code and hate doing UI can go about coding something real. Keep it simple yet rich. Avoid scripting et al.

Anyway, back to work on what my web page describes.

PerES Encryption

Gyros in your underwear causing chaffing?

[Graymalkin]

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.

Re:Not a chance

[JabberWokky]

I recently learned to use LaTeX recently and I wondered why it couldn't be turned into the next standard for online documents

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

Bleep! You're Disqualified

[pnatural]

(pure HTML 4.0 is a nightmare to code by hand)

what planet are you from? planet FrontPage?

LaTeX doesn't start with an X

[Shimbo]

You need to look at where the W3C is going before implying that they are heading the wrong way. Firstly, realise that HTML is obsolete; the W3C recommendation is now not HTML 4 but XHTML 1.0 . There's a lot of hype about XML but the basic idea is very simple and powerful. Understanding only HTML is like being able to write in plain TeX: you can do basic stuff but can't begin to understand the flexibility and power of the whole.

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.

Solving the wrong problem, surely?

[Hortensia Patel]

<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.

Precisions

[Acheon]

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.

*TeX, *ML, and styles illustrated

[_|()|\|]

While I don't agree with all the details of your post, it's a good start. TeX is a presentational markup language. SGML and XML define logical markup languages like DocBook. LaTeX tries to do the same thing, but its TeX roots show.

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:

HTML (SG|X)ML LaTeX
| | |
| (XSL|DSSSL) |
| | |
+---------+ |
| |
CSS |
| |
+---+---+
|
TeX
|
DVI
|
(PDF|PostScript|PCL)

Obviously, the lines blur. For example, the above diagram was written in Slashdot's subset of HTML, so it contains lots of &nbsp; and <br>--very presentational. Also, the diagram doesn't explicitly mention screen-based or interactive output media, which are very important.

Similaritis between LaTeX and HTML

[XneznJuber]

HTML and LaTeX are both generic markup systems, and a comparison between tags for structural elements in both cases.

H1 -- \chapter
H2 -- \secion
etc
and list type thingies:
LI - \item
UL - \begin{enumerate}
and everyones favories highlights:
I /I - emphtext
B /B - textbftest
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

Never

[commandant]

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.

XML/XSL, not LaTeX

[q000921]

What people see when they get started with LaTeX is actually pretty close to what you want for a document format for the web: it has semantic markup, it's high-level, and it's fairly easy to enter.

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.

Too Late.

[volsung]

Aside from other comments people have made about HTML being a markup language, not a structural language (like SGML), the other problem is an evolutionary one. HTML started out with a similar purpose to LaTeX: descript documents in a platform-independent manner. HTML was simpler because the designers weren't trying to achieve excellent print quality (which requires more constructs), but they just wanted a way to put documents with text, pictures, and hyperlinks online.

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.

What's next? The Zapruder film?

[hatless]

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.

Linking is also available in LaTeX

[The Welcome Rain]

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.

--

Correct link

[DeadSea]

Math ML

Flexibility and rigidity

[driehuis]

Yup, TeX is probably the most thoroughly designed tool on the planet. That said, it's basic premise is to limit an implementations freedom to adjust the layout (reading Knuths remarks about Postscript fonts getting a pixel added is very informative to know just how rigid TeX is designed to be). This rigidity is its strongest point; as Knuth puts it: if he writes part one of a five part book series in 1980, he expects part five to have the exact same layout in 2000, and anyone who has ever tried to collect SF paperbacks from an author over a number of years knows how ugly the differences are if you put the books side by side on your bookshelf.

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...

TechExplorer, MathML, 'n What-the-Web-Really-Needs

[twisty]

LaTeX is no replacement for HTML... it will never rule the web. Nor is HTML the conversant medium of math... it would have to evolve by orders of magnitude.

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 CONs

• Layout commands are primarily for publishing, with hypertext, color, and other media inserted as less-graceful afterthoughts, far short of layered document graphics.
• Conventional Math Fonts are not found on the majority of web-browsing systems.
• The power of LaTeX is quite separate from the Javascript-spinning, graphically enhanced, interactive layers of modern web tech.

MathML 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 CONs

• It does not add the scope of publishing packages you find in LaTeX, such as article styles for particular publications, or fonts conventional to math.
• As abstract as most of its markup commands are, it is far from 'conversational' compared to LaTeX.

Ideally 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.

LaTex plugin for Netscape

[spike_gran]

IBM has had a latex plugin for Netscape Navigator available for some time. You can check it out here . While I haven't used this commercial release, I did play with the alpha, which did fast and accurate rendering of equations.

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.

Not a chance

[Gromer]

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.

Different document paradigms

[woggo]

LaTeX is great. I use it for writing papers, documentation, personal correspondence, etc. (I even used LaTeX as an undergrad to typeset music history papers, including score examples.) However, while it is a (mostly) logical document markup language, there are many "physical" aspects that do not translate to the Web, such as font size, badness (word spacing), and so on.

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, SGML, HTML, XML...

[jefftp]

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.

In Other News...

[intmainvoid]

The Mozilla team announced today that they are delaying the ship date of their recently finished mozilla browser. "We were ready to ship, finally, but then somebody suggested that we add LaTeX support, and we just couldn't help ourselves" said one of the lead programmers.

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."