The other day on TeXtip, I threw this out:
Imagine if the web had been built on LaTeX instead of HTML …
Here are some of the responses I got:
- It would have been more pretty looking.
- Frightening.
- Single tear down the cheek.
- No crap amateurish content because of the steep learning curve, and beautiful rendering … What a dream!
- Shiny math, crappy picture placement: glad it did not!
- Overfull hboxes EVERYWHERE.
- LaTeX would have become bloated, and people would be tweeting about HTML being so much better.
- Noooo! LaTeX would have been “standardised”, “extended” and would by now be a useless pile of complexity.
No one pointed out that xxx sites would be safer?
An interesting thought experiment is to imagine what the Web would have been like had it been developed with Lisp as a base instead of HTML/XML.
@John
I hope you are not assuming that feedburner is here to stay? (That’s what you recommend your readers use to subscribe by email.) Why would Google keep feedburner and kill Reader?
It would not look beautiful with “Microsoft LaTeX-Page”, or whatever tool set would have developed for the stupid masses.