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Comment by dozzie | Hacker News Reader

> [...] HTML doesn't give as much typographic control as TEΧ, but when you compare to the full web suite, including CSS and SVG, that conclusion can't be sustained

And the very formula that was a proof that HTML+CSS+SVG is enough shows that it is not enough. In my browser it looks terrible, subscripts and superscripts are mixed, font is uneven, and what not. The formula is simply unreadable, in the sense that I can't decipher it, not merely it's awful to look at.

Moving out of TeX ground to HTML+stuff, you instantly give up plenty of goods that were implemented in TeX well (kerning and hyphenation among the others), you give up consistency of behaviour (font rendering), and in exchange you get source code that looks obnoxious compared to pure TeX or LaTeX.

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And to expand on this, it's not even just display failings, it's also semantic failings. There's no way I know of to do footnotes in HTML/CSS/SVG in a reasonable way. I'd want something like:

    <p>Some text.<footnote>Footnote text</footnote> Some more text.</p>

...to be rendered as something like:

    Some text.[1] Some more text.

And at the bottom of the page:

    [1] Footnote text.

But as far as I know there's no reasonable way to do this. There are similar problems for tables of contents, bibliographies, numbered figures, etc.

The idea that HTML is semantic in practice is pretty laughable.

All that said, I'd have a lot of objections to someone writing a "Using LaTeX as an HTML replacement" article. LaTeX is better designed overall, but they're also designed for fundamentally different use-cases.

Funnily enough Knuth was opposed to footnotes (or maybe it was his wife). Only at the behest of some colleagues in the humanities were they later added in TeX.

Footnotes have their uses [1].

[1] Particularly when you have to say something which is almost, but not quite right, and because you're writing an academic paper, you're both worried that a reviewer will dock you for being so naive, and as an academic it pains you to say something which is not technically correct, but you have this pesky 10 page limit, so you stuff the pedantry in scriptsize font on the bottom of the page.

Eh, don't ever say things that aren't correct. It's not wrong to say that something is a way of approximating or whatever; use your linguistic qualifiers. If you need more space, ask for it, or say less and write a second essay/article/whatever.

Footnotes are much better used for pointing people to further reading material.

The HTML way to do this is <details><summary>1</summary>Footnote text</details> which will inline the footnote and expand it on click; you could move it elsewhere on the page with CSS.

...which is still inferior, because it couples every footnote to every other footnote; if you add a footnote to the beginning you now have to go through and change the numbers on every single one. That's not even considering the issues you'll run into if you want to break up the content into pages.

Also, usefully displaying the footnote elsewhere on the page in a useful way is not a trivial task.

the html formula consists mostly out of sqares because of missing unicode characters on my windows 10... not really convincing, really

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