Comment by iamsohungry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamsohungry | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com