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Groups > comp.lang.forth > #36585
| From | Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> |
|---|---|
| Newsgroups | comp.lang.forth |
| Subject | Re: HTML vs. LaTeX (was: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ?) |
| Date | 2015-02-15 22:15 +0100 |
| Organization | A noiseless patient Spider |
| Message-ID | <mbr28q$ro$1@dont-email.me> (permalink) |
| References | (5 earlier) <mblidn$3lq$1@dont-email.me> <mblmod$nhh$1@dont-email.me> <2015Feb14.112126@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> <mbo4kf$mit$1@dont-email.me> <2015Feb15.113441@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> |
Anton Ertl wrote:
>>> <http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/franz/latex-bench>. The best
>>> hardware in 1990 was something like a 33MHz 486 or R3000, and
>>> Berners-Lee had to target the majority of existing hardware, e.g.,
>>> something like a 16MHz 386. Ok, a web page would not take as much
>>> time as our LaTeX benchmark, but still too much.
>>
>>Berner-Lee only wrote for the NeXT cubes they had available.
>
> I.e., a 25MHz 68030.
AFAIK the 1990 version already had a 25MHz 68040, and was "extremely fast"
for that time. For the color monitor, there was a i860 based card, which
did the Display PostScript, and that was very impressive - the i860 did made
a pretty good GPU.
>>Your benchmark
>>runs on a 140k byte LaTeX document, rendering 33 pages. The typical web
>>page of that time was one page.
>
> Yes, but it still would have taken too long on that hardware.
Some computer archeologists have dug out a fossiled NeXTCube, and demoe'd
the first browser on the original machine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c3Rt6QbHDw
It looks like rendering wasn't instantaneous, compared e.g. to opening the
help windows, it takes a second or two to load and render a new page; though
probably loading it was what took most of the time.
There are two reasons for the vision of Tim Berners-Lee not to use LaTeX:
First, his browser had an interactive WYSIWYG edit mode. That wouldn't work
with LaTeX. And second, there was a line mode browser for all those people
who had just a terminal access. Downgrading LaTeX to terminal mode is
possible, but having a more limited format makes downgrading much easier.
> Or transmit them as Postscript, which would have fit nicely with the
> Display Postscript on the NeXT systems. However, prerendering has the
> disadvantage that it creates a fixed layout, not one adapted to the
> window width and the font size preferences of the user. There is a
> reason why we don't use Postscript of PDF for web pages.
From the look of the demo and the screenshots it seems to be that the first
browser had a fixed width, and wasn't "responsive", as it is now called ;-).
>>The LaTeX community back then already had found out that they needed
>>styles.
>
> Scientific writers do not really need styles. Hardly anybody who
> writes something with LaTeX defines his own style. We choose a style,
> because we have to, but typically we either use the default "article"
> style for articles, or a style the publisher prescribes. That is
> similar to the original HTML idea of the writer just providing the
> content, and the reader deciding the style (which then consisted only
> of the text width and font sizes).
Ok, LaTeX styles come in two flavors: One flavor is the functional
extension, and the other is design. As content creator, you may need the
functional extensions - if you don't need them, it would be a sign that
LaTeX is not sufficiently modularized, and offers all the functionality you
need by default. Usually, you have 5 to 10 \usepackage{}s underneath the
\documentclass just for a typical document.
The other is the "theme", the graphical layout. That's not up to the
content creator, but it is still necessary. That's on the side of the
publisher or reader.
> The whole style nonsense came with the "web designers", who wanted a
> specific layout and wanted to force it down the reader's throat.
That's a different problem: Apparently, those people were educated by MS
Word. As you say, they didn't even meet Adobe, which was the number 1
address for commercial typesetting software.
> That
> idea is alien to both the original HTML and LaTeX. Actually
> Postscript and PDF are perfect formats for that, but somehow the web
> designers and Adobe did not meet (at least not before Adobe bought
> Macromedia).
With the performance limitations of a 1990 high end machine, these pre-
formatted intermediate files indeed have something to offer.
>>IMHO, TeX already is one of my showcases, that you should not thing about
>>adding a language late in the process. Originally, TeX was supposed to do
>>all the typesetting, and TeX, as programming language, just gradually
>>evolved.
>
> Yes, Knuth had expected people to take TeX and changing it for their
> needs.
That doesn't work, because web is unmaintainable. Nobody wants to change
TeX. Everybody wants to use the domain-specific language.
> It turns out that even the style designers prefer to leave it
> untouched, and build on top of it.
There's also the interoperability issue... if you were to write a new LaTeX
feature, and it requires your users to get your private fork of lualatex, do
you think they would download it? Probably not, especially not, if they
want to use 10 such features which requires them to merge 10 forks of
lualatex (with github, maybe they could even achieve that, but the
likelyhood of a conflict is high).
But loading ten extensions written in that interactive interpretative
language which TeX is into any of the currently four or five available TeX
implementations, that works.
That means extensibility is not something that comes from releasing the
source. It requires structure. Especially, it requires to put the
interpreter or compiler of the extensible language right into your system.
That makes it an extensible system.
If you look at Gforth, we have both Forth- and C-based stuff in there. The
build procedure of the C-based stuff is really, really awful, and complex.
The build procedure of the Forth part is trivial, and that includes even the
libcc.fs stuff, which has high internal complexity (we generate C code on
the fly, compile it, create a shared library, load it and bind to the
functions), but not for the build process itself. It is trivial, because we
have support of a powerful language.
Things only become hard if you have a limited special-purpose language which
you can't extend.
--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://bernd-paysan.de/
net2o ID: kQusJzA;7*?t=uy@X}1GWr!+0qqp_Cn176t4(dQ*
Back to comp.lang.forth | Previous | Next — Previous in thread | Next in thread | Find similar | Unroll thread
Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? visualforth@rocketmail.com - 2015-02-12 12:13 -0800
Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? Mark Wills <markwills1970@gmail.com> - 2015-02-12 12:56 -0800
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? empty-buffers <empty.buffersYOU-DONT-WANT-THIS@gmail.NEITHER-THIS.com> - 2015-02-12 21:32 +0000
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2015-02-13 13:08 -0500
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2015-02-13 19:39 +0100
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2015-02-13 14:14 -0500
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2015-02-13 21:28 +0100
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? Jason Damisch <jasondamisch@yahoo.com> - 2015-02-13 14:22 -0800
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2015-02-14 01:34 +0100
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2015-02-13 22:42 -0800
HTML vs. LaTeX (was: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ?) anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2015-02-14 10:21 +0000
Re: HTML vs. LaTeX (was: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ?) Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2015-02-14 19:37 +0100
Re: HTML vs. LaTeX (was: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ?) visualforth@rocketmail.com - 2015-02-14 11:13 -0800
Re: HTML vs. LaTeX (was: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ?) Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2015-02-14 21:07 +0100
Re: HTML vs. LaTeX (was: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ?) Jason Damisch <jasondamisch@yahoo.com> - 2015-02-14 12:50 -0800
Re: HTML vs. LaTeX (was: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ?) Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2015-02-14 22:32 +0100
Re: HTML vs. LaTeX (was: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ?) Jason Damisch <jasondamisch@yahoo.com> - 2015-02-14 15:10 -0800
Re: HTML vs. LaTeX (was: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ?) anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2015-02-15 10:34 +0000
Re: HTML vs. LaTeX (was: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ?) Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2015-02-15 22:15 +0100
Re: HTML vs. LaTeX (was: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ?) anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2015-02-16 12:45 +0000
Re: HTML vs. LaTeX (was: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ?) krishna.myneni@ccreweb.org - 2015-02-15 13:55 -0800
Re: HTML vs. LaTeX (was: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ?) anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2015-02-16 13:52 +0000
Re: HTML vs. LaTeX (was: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ?) Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2015-02-16 15:47 +0100
Re: HTML vs. LaTeX Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2015-02-16 09:05 -0800
Re: HTML vs. LaTeX anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2015-02-17 12:21 +0000
Re: HTML vs. LaTeX Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2015-02-20 13:23 -0800
Re: HTML vs. LaTeX Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2015-02-20 22:33 +0100
Re: HTML vs. LaTeX anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2015-02-21 15:14 +0000
Re: HTML vs. LaTeX Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2015-02-21 20:23 +0100
Re: HTML vs. LaTeX Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2015-02-21 11:33 -0800
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? krishna.myneni@ccreweb.org - 2015-02-14 10:14 -0800
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2015-02-22 01:57 -0500
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? krishna.myneni@ccreweb.org - 2015-02-22 18:35 -0800
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2015-02-23 01:58 -0500
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? krishna.myneni@ccreweb.org - 2015-02-23 04:59 -0800
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2015-02-23 19:18 -0500
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? krishna.myneni@ccreweb.org - 2015-02-23 18:09 -0800
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? Mark Wills <markwills1970@gmail.com> - 2015-02-24 01:04 -0800
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? krishna.myneni@ccreweb.org - 2015-02-24 02:51 -0800
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? Jason Damisch <jasondamisch@yahoo.com> - 2015-02-24 10:23 -0800
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2015-02-23 21:19 +0100
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? krishna.myneni@ccreweb.org - 2015-02-23 17:58 -0800
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? Mark Wills <markwills1970@gmail.com> - 2015-02-24 01:07 -0800
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? krishna.myneni@ccreweb.org - 2015-02-24 02:19 -0800
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? Paul E Bennett <Paul_E.Bennett@topmail.co.uk> - 2015-02-15 12:18 +0000
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? empty-buffers <empty.buffersYOU-DONT-WANT-THIS@gmail.NEITHER-THIS.com> - 2015-02-13 18:55 +0000
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? Melzzzzz <mel@zzzzz.com> - 2015-02-13 20:27 +0100
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2015-02-13 09:53 -1000
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? "WJ" <w_a_x_man@yahoo.com> - 2015-02-13 14:18 +0000
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? visualforth@rocketmail.com - 2015-02-13 11:03 -0800
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2015-02-13 22:46 -0800
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? Mark Wills <markwills1970@gmail.com> - 2015-02-14 02:35 -0800
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? Coos Haak <chforth@hccnet.nl> - 2015-02-14 18:47 +0100
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2015-02-14 18:56 -0800
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? Ilya Tarasov <ilya74.tarasov@gmail.com> - 2015-02-15 17:10 -0800
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? Mark Wills <markwills1970@gmail.com> - 2015-02-16 01:20 -0800
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? Lars Brinkhoff <lars.spam@nocrew.org> - 2015-02-16 12:35 +0100
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2015-02-16 08:12 -1000
Re: Is 2015 the year of FORTH ? Ilya Tarasov <ilya74.tarasov@gmail.com> - 2015-02-16 15:17 -0800
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