Re: SW/LD researchers groking LaTeX and HTML (Was vs Re: [ESWC 2015] First Call for Paper)

On 2014-10-02 11:08, Luca Matteis wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 10:48 AM, Sarven Capadisli <info@csarven.ca> wrote:
>> If a SW/LD "computer scientist" "researcher" can manage to deal with LaTeX,
>> would it be presumptuous to say that they can probably manage HTML?
>>
>> If a non-computer scientist can get a Web page up or use an existing bloging
>> software/service to publish some information, do you think that the average
>> SW/LD will be able to cope with that? Or are we asking for too much from the
>> SW/LD researcher here?
>
> You're again comparing two different technologies that are used for
> different things!

I was addressing an issue on working with these technologies. It had 
nothing to do with the quality or the purpose of the technologies in 
comparison. So, why paint it as such?

> HTML works great for the Web because it's
> lightweight. Latex works great for papers that need to end up in a
> physical journal because it has better facilities for that.
>
> Imagine a Latex person coming to you asking "why doesn't the Web
> community embrace Latex as a format for rendering web pages".
>
> HTML can't and won't work for everything. So let's not presume it will
> and let's find solutions such as Latex RDF formats or even trying to
> embed RDF statements in PDF documents to me seems like a sensible
> idea.
>
> RDF can be expressed in Turtle, JSON-LD, HTML (RDFa), XML (RDF/XML)...
> adding PDF or Latex to the group seems like a logical thing to do.

How often do SW/LD researchers pick up print journals as opposed to PDF 
files and then maybe run to their printers?

How many HTML documents did you look at in the past 24 hours to consume 
information in comparison to PDF?

So, it sounds like you are advocating the importance of print quality 
over everything else in the picture.

HTML+CSS may not solve all of our problems, but I think they do 
remarkable job in advancing human knowledge. The question is, what is 
the priority for SW/LD research conferences? To comply with whatever 
works best for publishers, or to raise the level of scientific 
communication and discovery in its own field?

IMHO, we have our fundamental priorities mixed up. And, that's clouded 
by the fact that there is some technologies and tooling that works best 
for publishers and print output (at least at this time).

You can have the last say on this thread. I am primarily interested in 
hearing SW/LD research venues making a compromise to help SW/LD research 
go forward.

-Sarven
http://csarven.ca/#i