[billconan]

I don't think HTML is the right approach. HTML is better than PDF, but it is still a format for displaying/rendering.

the actual paper content format should be separated from its rendering.

i.e. it should contain abstract, sections, equations, figures, citations etc. but it shouldn't have font sizes, layout etc.

the viewer platforms then should be able to style the content differently.

[cluckindan]

HTML alone is in fact not a format for displaying/rendering. Done properly, it is a structural representation of the content. (This is often called ”semantic HTML”.)

They are converting to HTML to make the content more accessible. Accessibility in this context means a11y, in effect ”more accessible” equates to ”more compatible with screen readers”.

While PDF documents can be made accessible, it is way easier to do it in HTML, where browsers build an actual AOM (accessibility object model) tree and expose it to screen readers.

>it should contain abstract, sections, equations, figures, citations etc.

So <article>, <section>, <math>, <figure>, <cite>, etc.

[o11c]

The hope for semantic HTML died the day they said "stop using <i>, use <em>", regardless of what the actual purpose of the italics was (it's usually not emphasis).

[benatkin]

Much of it is a structural representation of how to display the content.

[Theodores]

I like Arxiv and what they are doing, however, do the auto-generated HTML files contain nothing more than a sea of divs dressed with a billion classes?

I would be delighted if they could do better than that, with figcaptions as well as figures, and sections 'scoped' with just one <h2-6> heading per section. They could specify how it really should be done, the HTML way, with a well defined way of doing the abstract and getting the cited sources to be in semantic markup yet not in some massive footer at the back.

There should also be a print stylesheet so that the paper prints out elegantly on A4 paper. Yes, I know you can 'print to PDF' but you can get all the typesetting needed in modern CSS stylesheets.

Furthermore, they need to write a whole new HTML editor that discards WYSIWYG in favour of semantic markup. WYSIWYG has held us back by decades as it is useless for creating a semantic document. We haven't moved on from typewriters and the conventions needed to get those antiques to work, with word processors just emulating what people were used to at the time. What we really need is a means to evolve the written word, so that our thinking is 'semantic' when we come to put together documents, with a 'document structure first' approach.

LaTeX is great, however, last time I used it was many decades ago, when the tools were 'vi' (so not even vim) and GhostScript, running on a Sun workstation with mono screen. Since then I have done a few different jobs and never have I had the need to do anything in LaTex or even open a LaTeX file. In the wild, LaTeX is rarer than hen's teeth. Yet we all read scientific papers from time to time, and Arxiv was founded on the availability of Tex files.

The lack of widespread adoption of semantic markup has been a huge bonus to Google and other gatekeepers that have the money to develop their own heuristics to make sense of 'seas of divs'. As it happens, Google have also been somewhat helpful with Chrome and advancing the web, even if it is for their gatekeeping purposes.

The whole world of gatekeeping is also atrocious in academia. Knowledge wants to be free, but it is also big business to the likes of Springer, who are already losing badly to open publishing.

As you say, in this instance, accessibility means screen readers, however, I hope that we can do better than that, to get back to the OG Tim Berners Lee vision of what the web should be like, as far as structuring information is concerned.

[dimal]

Perfect is the enemy of good. HTML is good enough. Let’s get this done.

And as another commenter has pointed out, HTML does exactly what you ask for. If it’s done correctly, it doesn’t contain font sizes or layout. Users can style HTML differently with custom CSS.

[billconan]

mixing rendering definitions with content (PDF) is something from the printer era, that is unsuitable for the digital era.

HTML was a digital format, but it wanted to be a generic format for all document types, not just papers, so it contains a lot of extras that a paper format doesn't need.

for research papers, since they share the same structure, we can further separate content from rendering.

for example, if you want to later connect a paper with an AI, do you want to send <div class="abstract"> ... ?

or do some nasty heuristic to extract the abstract? like document. getElementsByClassName("abstract")[0] ?

[m-schuetz]

That's a purist stance that's never going to work out in praxtice. Authors will always want to adjust the presentation of content, and html might be even better suited for that than Latex, which as bad at both.

[bob1029]

> HTML is better than PDF

I disagree. PDF is the most desirable format for printed media and its analogues. Any time I plan to seriously entertain a paper from Arxiv, I print it out first. I prefer to have the author's original intent in hand. Arbitrary page breaks and layout shifts that are a result of my specific hardware/software configuration are not desirable to me in this context of use.

[ACCount37]

I agree that PDF is best for things that are meant to be printed, no questions. But I wonder how common actually printing those papers is?

In research and in embedded hardware both, I've met some people who had entire stacks of papers printed out - research papers or datasheets or application notes - but also people who had 3 monitors and 64GB of RAM and all the papers open as browser tabs.

I'm far closer to the latter myself. Is this a "generational split" thing?

[s0rce]

I used to print papers, probably stopped about 10 years ago. I now read everything in Zotero where I can highlight and save my annotations and sync my library between devices. You can also seamlessly archive html and pdfs. I don't see people printing papers in my workplace that often unless you need to read them in a wet lab where the computer is not convenient.

[afavour]

Wouldn’t that be CSS?

[billconan]

no

<div class="abstract-container">

<div class="abstract">

<pre><code> abstract text ... </code></pre>

</div>

<div class="author-list">

<ol>

<li>author one</li>

<li>author two</li>

<ol>

</div>

should be just:

[abstract]

abstract text

[authors]

author one | email | affiliation

author two | email | affiliation