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Comment by BlueTemplar | Hacker News Reader

The whole issue with LaTeX ia that it renders to PDFs, which aren't appropriate these days any more for most electronic documents because you want reflowable content rather than fixed layout. And (m)HTML is great for that and can include other content types :

https://eater.net/quaternions

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Please show me a reflowable document with decent typographics. No, seriously, why browsers don’t implement fully-featured layout algorithms? Until then, I’d prefer a well-typeset PDF over an average website for a longer-form and graphics-rich content.

Also, those are naturally usable offline, are durable and have no interactive annoyances.

Your point is spot-on. Reflowable text is incompatible with most scientific writing and with anything more complex than simple prose.

I didn’t say this. I believe it’s current implementations that are not good enough. Some ebook reading software comes close.

Hmm, do you have any more specific examples of typographics being a deal breaker ?

MHTML (aka .eml) is usable offline too (except for some reason by Firefox ?!?), while PDFs are horrible on screens smaller than the width of a page.

I'm not sure what interactive annoyances on scientific websites you're talking about - the most problematic ones these days are those with the assumption of a working Java or Flash plugin (and if they start to be plagued by irrelevant scripts it's much easier so far to block JavaScript in a browser than in a pdf reader), meanwhile many pdf readers don't even have any animation support, which is about content rather than presentation ! (As a metaphor : would you support a format unable to show pictures ?)

I'm afraid you rather missed the point in the last paragraph -- "we need more such systems with which to create and render content, before denting the DOM+CSS hegemony". Fixed format is much preferable for textbooks or other publications which have many diagrams as part of the body text.

Textbooks, sure - other publications with many diagrams - that's my whole point, no (the fixed format often makes understanding worse because they can't just put the diagram in the specific spot that refers to it, and finding that spot is additional work) - also pdfs only really support fixed, non-interactive diagrams.

As far as I know the main issue there is that LaTeX is a Turing-complete language and no reliable complete export filter can exist, so in particular one cannot export reliably all of LaTeX to HTML

I don't think Turing-completeness implies any issues when converting programs between equally powerful automata. In fact, a lot of results in the theory of automata / early computational complexity take a form of converting all programs of machine A -- in fact the machine itself -- in order to run it on machine B.

In theory there should be no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there often is. TeX's syntax itself being Turing-complete means you can barely start to do static analysis on the code before hitting a wall you can only get over by installing a huge fraction of the ~1GB download that is TeXLive. "Being theoretically possible" is in no way orthogonal to "impractical in many or most circumstances".

Please take a look at the following comments thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27820466, in particular at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27822662 where Massimiliano Gubinelli (one of the main TeXmacs developers) explains the issue.

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