On 2014-06-17 at 04:12, Rusi wrote:
> On Tuesday, June 17, 2014 7:12:11 AM UTC+5:30, Garreau, Alexandre wrote:
>> On 2014-06-14 at 16:51, Yuri Khan wrote:
>>> Yes, LaTeX does a lot to produce a beautifully typeset printout from
>>> an ASCII source. This is not enough; I want that same beautiful
>>> typesetting on screen, in browser, in any page width I happen to have,
>>> in my favorite typeface and font size, without having to recompile the
>>> document. And at the same time, it does too much. It has to maintain,
>>> and document authors have to utilize, a multitude of workarounds that
>>> are caused by TeX not using Unicode internally.
>
>> Having something technically and typographically good like LaTeX,
>> semantic and interpreted like HTML and language-neutral like
>> markdown/any-binary-interpreted-format would be great.
>
> Yes its important that we start moving to XeteX (luatex) where I can
> directly write α etc than \alpha.

I know XeteX, but I wasn’t thinking to it… And yet LaTeX is not fully
language-neutral because of command names (\emph, \textbf, \title,
\section, etc.) and isn’t interpreted, and not reaaaaally semantic
(since it’s only made to be compiled into a graphical thing).

> ¹ Dare I say “universal”? As math is the only language approaching
> universality known to humanity.

Well, nothing is really universal (everything need a shared knowledge,
thus, a culture). Even math, when it isn’t based on latin or greek
language, stay based on occidental/arabic/indo-European culture and
symbols.

But we can artifically make universal things, just as we more or less did
with lojban, or TCP/IP, etc.

So what we can do is just invent new pieces of culture based on the most
universal things we can, and avoiding linguistic/geographic/gender/class
cultural biases.