> How does one proceed in a future-proof way whereby the choices are not regretted down the line?
What's wrong with HTML that has classnames, or the new data attributes that HTML5 has? They're not dependent on any one implementation and HTML seems like it's the most future-proof thing out there apart from plain text.
In order:
- <div class='expando'>Hide/Show this text.</div>
- <a href="#something">Go somewhere</a>
- <a href="otherdoc.html">Hyperlink</a>
- <video src="hello.mp4" />
- <code>console.log('hello world!');</code>
Almost any JS developer can make these work without any library, from what the browser provides, alone. Give the innerHTML to eval, for example. It seems like the most future-proof way to go, and I'll be happy to be proven wrong and find out about something I don't know about. But Markdown nor any of its derivatives don't seem to be good enough.
Of course, you could also write a Markdown parser that has constructs that will compile to the above too.
> This is about the inadequacy of PDF as a document format for the future.
And I'm guessing, since we're doing this over an HTML document, that that'll be sufficient instead.
I don't know about HTML5, so I will look into that. But my concern is more about how to design the system. Let me explain.
LaTeX is quite a formidable system nowadays, with a well-developed markup language optimized for mathematics and technical writing, as well as a compiler which does advanced typesetting (for PDF output, that is). Because of the way the system is organized, there are thousands of packages available for LaTeX which essentially extend the markup language and provide new functionality to the compiler to produce diagrams, for example, or certain alternate PDF formats, etc. The amount of work done in the LaTeX domain in terms of development is quite amazing.
In view of this, is there a way of extending LaTeX in such a way that all this functionality ports over to the creation of more active documents/webpages?
Comments
> How does one proceed in a future-proof way whereby the choices are not regretted down the line?
What's wrong with HTML that has classnames, or the new data attributes that HTML5 has? They're not dependent on any one implementation and HTML seems like it's the most future-proof thing out there apart from plain text.
In order:
- <div class='expando'>Hide/Show this text.</div>
- <a href="#something">Go somewhere</a>
- <a href="otherdoc.html">Hyperlink</a>
- <video src="hello.mp4" />
- <code>console.log('hello world!');</code>
Almost any JS developer can make these work without any library, from what the browser provides, alone. Give the innerHTML to eval, for example. It seems like the most future-proof way to go, and I'll be happy to be proven wrong and find out about something I don't know about. But Markdown nor any of its derivatives don't seem to be good enough.
Of course, you could also write a Markdown parser that has constructs that will compile to the above too.
> This is about the inadequacy of PDF as a document format for the future.
And I'm guessing, since we're doing this over an HTML document, that that'll be sufficient instead.
Thanks for the reply:
I don't know about HTML5, so I will look into that. But my concern is more about how to design the system. Let me explain.
LaTeX is quite a formidable system nowadays, with a well-developed markup language optimized for mathematics and technical writing, as well as a compiler which does advanced typesetting (for PDF output, that is). Because of the way the system is organized, there are thousands of packages available for LaTeX which essentially extend the markup language and provide new functionality to the compiler to produce diagrams, for example, or certain alternate PDF formats, etc. The amount of work done in the LaTeX domain in terms of development is quite amazing.
In view of this, is there a way of extending LaTeX in such a way that all this functionality ports over to the creation of more active documents/webpages?