alternatives to the concept of a page, Gutenberg press vs LCD screen

[Taylor, P]

Peter Flynn wrote:


On 29/08/2019 21:52, Taylor, P wrote:


Use properly, LaTeX and HTML have exactly the same function :  to indicate the structure of a document.

The difference is that LaTeX is its own rendering engine, whereas HTML
uses a browser, and (as you rightly point out) CSS

HTML does not require a browser (nor, of course, does CSS).  HTML is a markup language, CSS a language that maps markup to presentation — the fact that the only place that one normally encounters them is via a  browser is neither here nor there.  In fact, complete books can and have been typeset using HTML+CSS — for example Lie & Bos's Cascading Style Sheets, 3rd edition, of which one reads :

The book Cascading Style Sheets, designing for the Web,<http://www.w3.org/Style/LieBos3e/> which Håkon Lie and I wrote back in 2005 (for the 3rd edition), was written in valid, clean HTML, with images in PNG, and a CSS style sheet to turn it into “camera-ready” PDF for the printers. And now, in 2013, publishers are using CSS every day to make books.

[...] but LaTeX 2e is still very much on a par with HTML before the
introduction of CSS.


Not really, I think. With LaTeX (2e or otherwise) you can still produce
a document formatted in every detail; with HTML minus CSS, you can only
produce a document formatted as much as the browser-maker has defined,
which isn't much.

I meant "on a par" in terms of its lack of separation of form and content.  If one must express both form and content in the same language, then the end result is likely to be a complete mess except in the hands of experts or the true aficionado.

** Phil.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/attachments/20190830/132a6695/attachment.html>