Personally, I would rather just have TeX itself target the web rather than wedging another layer into the typesetting stack. As far as I know, other than the sheer size of the language, there is nothing fundamental stopping someone (I guess me, eventually) from writing "htmlatex."
Modern web pages are already designed with "camera ready" in mind, essentially with browser width being the only thing that changes layout.
My point is more that TeX is a typesetter just as a Web browser is. They're incompatible typesetting systems with wildly different command languages.
Re:Why I Prefer RST to Markdown
by justincormack on Wednesday July 31, 2024 @09:02PM
(#41125227)
I think the poster above wants to run TeX in js to format the text. I have seen a bunch of hyphenation and suchlike stretching back years not sure about running a full engine.
reStructuredText isn't itself a typesetting language. It's meant to be something of an interposer between the semantic meaning of what you're writing and the thing that does the typesetting. The hope is that it, unlike something heavily constrained like Markdown, gives you the tools to capture that semantic meaning and transform it into something that can be typeset.
Like, the goal isn't to throw out TeX. The goal is to be able to target TeX as a typesetter along with Web browsers and e-book readers and even things like GNU info and troff without having to rewrite the content wholesale to fit each one.