Re: Formats and icing (Was Re: [ESWC 2015] First Call for Paper)

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 9:26 PM, Sarven Capadisli <info@csarven.ca> wrote:
> Let me ask you to take a step back for a second. Are you convinced that
> there are far more possibilities with LaTeX/PDF for data representation,
> presentation and interaction than HTML+CSS+JavaScript+RDFa+SVG+MathML.. ? Do
> we really need to battle that out? :) Don't worry, I will. As I'll
> demonstrate in my final PhD dissertation ;)

No battling :) but I'd be glad to discuss. I think for interactions,
no doubt, HTML has a lot more to offer than PDF which has barely any
interactions capabilities at all, compared to things like WebGL, CSS
animations and so on of the Web world.

But specifically for publications, these are still static documents.
One of the main goals of publications is to be able to combine them
into a journal right? Imagine doing that in HTML. You'd have
inconsistencies all over the journal. So until we start building
interactive publications, I see no reason to move away from the
wonders that Latex/PDF can accomplish. Just think of graphing
libraries and the entire vibrant Tex community that builds templates
for specific visualizations -
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/158668/nice-scientific-pictures-show-off
- some of this stuff is available in HTML but it's far from the
maturity latex/pdf has achieved.

> If PDF was so good at static documents, we'd have the Web of PDFs instead of Web of HTMLs. I disagree that the Web is rarely static.

Sorry but that's a bad analogy. HTML was designed to be lightweight
because it needs to be transferred across the wire and visualized
immediately (HTTP request). PDF is not lightweight at all.

> Maybe. But, that's totally backwards, IMO.

But why is it backwards? We have different formats serving different
purposes. Diversity is healthy. Simply because PDF is not in the Web
stack it doesn't make it Web-unfriendly.

Best,
Luca

Received on Wednesday, 1 October 2014 19:55:30 UTC