LaTeX is a perfect software, zero defects for YEARS now.
Which tool could claim that?
LaTeX is certainly the best LaTeX, but it doesn't really have that many competitors.
It's been a few years since you used CSS :) Both of these things are trivial to do now
But to be clear: while I think my CSS experience would give me a grasp of what needs to be expressed and some ideas for how to express it, there is a whole other layer of actually applying that, and reconciling it with the content, which would be a challenge (and is done for you by the browser in CSS' case)
> As far as LaTeX's abilities as a programming language go, I have an interpreter for a reasonable subset of C written in TeX (it was an academic exercise but this is just to show what is possible). So it is much more than a mere markup language.
I believe you, but I also question whether that level of power is actually being used by people making documents with it, or whether it just adds complexity. I genuinely don't know. But those are the kinds of places one might find improvements to be made.
I would love to work on this, but definitely can't commit the time.
There's a lot of competitors to the first step, in the vein of having multiple tools that are plain-text files but convert to rich-text output. However, most of these tools lack good, or even any, support for the fine-tuning capabilities. Where there is competition in the fine-tuning space, the relevant tools are largely based on WYSIWYG editors--which makes sense when you consider that it's easier to fine-tune properties when you get immediate visual feedback on what the fine-tuning you're doing does to the result. But these editors don't provide an easy way to integrate in the workflows of the other tools, since the underlying formats don't really support the fine-tuning capabilities.
I never realised how awful LaTeX was until I started working with a co-author who is blind, if you just "write LaTeX" you end up with equations, algorithms and tables constantly half-off the page.
Where it fails is in reporting the problem in a meaningful way. This is, of course, very difficult to accomplish, since there is no nice mapping from line-of-TeX to visual error. What's more, any tool which could provide such an error would be so constrained as to be useless for typesetting.
IIRC, TeX only becomes defined bug-free on Knuth's death. However, it is feature-complete, in the sense that there are no more features to be added, even if such functionality is desperately needed. (Most notably, TeX does have issues with i18n and especially right-to-left text support)