LaTeX is not equivalent to PDF, though that is one publishing format it supports.
HTML lacks numerous features which a first-class document-specification language should have, including grid layouts (only very recently possible), footnotes and sidenotes, and formulae.
The promise of LaTeX is that documents could be defined strictly in semantic terms, though my belief is that this would last for approximately 37.229 minutes after such a proposal actually hit the Web.
The underlying failure of HTML is that it is runtime compiled, not precompiled. This makes things far easier on authors and publishers, and far worse for readers. In the early days, the former mattered in order to incentivise content. Last I checked, incentivising content is no longer the Web's principle problem.
I've also been leaning toward LaTeX as a document speification language for hypertext systems, though I don't believe that alone is sufficient to fix the Web's ills.
HTML lacks numerous features which a first-class document-specification language should have, including grid layouts (only very recently possible), footnotes and sidenotes, and formulae.
The promise of LaTeX is that documents could be defined strictly in semantic terms, though my belief is that this would last for approximately 37.229 minutes after such a proposal actually hit the Web.
The underlying failure of HTML is that it is runtime compiled, not precompiled. This makes things far easier on authors and publishers, and far worse for readers. In the early days, the former mattered in order to incentivise content. Last I checked, incentivising content is no longer the Web's principle problem.
I've also been leaning toward LaTeX as a document speification language for hypertext systems, though I don't believe that alone is sufficient to fix the Web's ills.