Ever wanted a simple, 18-page overview of General Relativity? Apparently, there’s one here. I wouldn’t know, since it’s only available in PostScript, PDF, and DVI formats, which (unless I’m being paid) I don’t download on principle.
If it’s on the web and you want people to read it, post it in fucking HTML. If it’s on the web and you want machines to read it, post it in XML. There is absolutely no reason, logic or excuse for not making a document available in one of these two formats.
By all means, provide a PDF alternative for people who want to print it out – but note the use of the word "alternative".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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