Comments on: Web idiocy

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 11:31:00 +0000

Hmm, I've never brought myself to post to John's blog before, but this is about maths, so I'm vaguely qualified to make a point. I have to agree with Chris: turning LaTeX into HTML always looks a mess, and it just gets worse and worse the more equations you enter. MathML, for all the hype, doesn't seem to work much better for anything beyond "school-level" maths.

However, having looked at the PDF, and given that it's an "introduction", I suppose there is some arguement for converting it to HTML. However, most of the stuff on the ArXiV would look horrible in HTML format.

What about converting each page to a big PNG/GIF file? Maybe bandwidth issues mean that they don't want to give this option, but it would be a half-way house for lazy people like John.

--Matt

By: Chris Lightfoot

Chris Lightfoot — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 05:06:00 +0000

Turning TeX into HTML isn't very easy ([La]TeX is much more expressive, both semantically and typographically). There are lots of half-arsed "solutions" to do it; I'm not surprised that arXiv.org have sensibly decided to ignore all of them.

By: Chris Lightfoot

Chris Lightfoot — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 19:10:00 +0000

By: john b

john b — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 15:50:00 +0000

True. Still, Video 2000 is a technically better standard than VHS, and it would have been better had domestic videotape been based on it. Yet I’d be similarly irritated if someone offered me a V2000 tape of an interesting-sounding TV programme.

Given how trivial it is to convert word processed documents to HTML (no, I don’t mean by using Word’s ‘save as some bizarre XML hybrid which definitely isn’t HTML’ function), and to display equations as monochrome GIFs, it seems like a bizarre thing not to offer alongside all the other display options.

By: Chris Lightfoot

Chris Lightfoot — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 14:59:00 +0000

I think that’s unfair. Firstly, DVI etc. are a lot better for expressing equations, which is something that paper needs; and secondly, DVI long predates HTML, and, frankly, is a much better format. If the web had been based on LaTeX and DVI, we’d be in much less of a mess than we are now.