[JackeJR]

There are many reasons this comparison is not made. I will just touch on one. The target medium is different. For html, you have monitors of different sizes as well as windows that can be resized. For latex, you choose your target at the start: A4 paper? Screen presentation? A0 poster?

With a fixed medium in mind, you can be extremely particular on where on this canvas you want a piece of text/graphic or whatever.

Without a fixed medium, you have to have logic to address the different mediums and compromises have to be made.

[SebastianKra]

That seems contradictory, when Latex is rather famously imprecise at placing figures and such. Weren't both languages (at least at some point) intended to take layouting control away from the writer?

But regardless, I think that, in addition to moving away from Latex we should also reconsider the primary output format. Documents are rarely printed anymore, and inaccessible, fixed-size A4 pdfs are annoying to read on anything but an iPad Pro.

[wtallis]

LaTeX isn't intended to take layout control away from the author so much as it is intended to automatically produce a good-enough layout allowing a single author to produce a very large document without employing a designer.

HTML by contrast explicitly does remove control over layout from the author and place it in the hands of the user (and their chosen user agent).

Both languages have mechanisms to (somewhat) separate the content from the formatting rules.

[dgfl]

Well, maybe they’re not printed by yourself. But many academics, often young people included, still print papers.

[chabska]

HTML+CSS has facilities to target a page format (CSS @page rule, cm and in dimension units). Not to say that it's on the same level as LaTeX, but it's pretty impressive by its own right.

[SkiFire13]

Note that this won't prevent the page from being displayed in other sizes, where it will most likely have a broken layout instead.

[maegul]

Are there good deep dives on how far you can practically this? Especially in combination with headless browser pdf generation?

Last time I looked into it, a while ago, my impression was that it would get rickety too soon. It’d be a good place to be, I think, if web and “document” tech stacks could have nice and practical convergence.

[karencarits]

> For latex, you choose your target at the start

Yes, sometimes, but I would say that one of the benefits of latex is how easy you can switch to another layout. But I guess the point is that you typically render to a set of outputs with fixed dimensions (pdf)

[eru]

> For latex, you choose your target at the start: A4 paper? Screen presentation? A0 poster?

You can change that as you go along.

[naikrovek]

> You can change that as you go along.

that's not the point they were trying to make. you may need to change the display target for every viewer.