HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)

https://github.com/brucemiller/LaTeXML/issues

It's a pretty deep rabbit hole, but I wholeheartedly agree most standard package support incantations should be easy and few to use.

And to respond to your implied criticism: the stability/reliability/fidelity of PDFs is a myth. It would be hard to say how many dozens of PDFs I've come across in the last two years that don't look the same across devices/viewers (or sometimes just fail to render in their entirety). This played a significant part in a cascade of errors in one incident I know of that resulted in the payout of a claim more than $1,000 but less than $10,000—not to mention a lot of strife and anger for the persons involved over the course of multiple months before resolution.

(As I write this now, I realize I'd almost forgotten about the fact that almost every time I've taken something to FedEx or UPS to be printed at a self-service kiosk, the result has been unusable, so I've had to take it to the clerk to have them print it instead.)

HTML at least has the property that it's still trivial to access and extract the data if you run into either malformed inputs or ones that are valid but incompatible/unsupported by whatever viewer (browser) you happen to be using, which is a lot more than you can say for more opaque formats like Java, PDF, and Flash.

Why not? Things like Arabic ligatures already do that, no?

In unoficial notes for the classes, most authors use single column, and try to remember the magic spell to keep the figures in place. Something like [H!] ???

Also most books are single column.

> 1. TeX has many advantages that make it ideal as a format for the archives: It is plain text, it is compact, it is freely available for all platforms, it produces extremely high-quality output, and it retains contextual information.

> 2. It is thus more likely to be a good source from which to generate newer formats, e.g., HTML, MathML, various ePub formats, etc. [...]

Not that I disagree with the effort and it surely is a unique challenge to, at scale, convert the Turing complete macro language TeX to something other than PDF. And, at the same time, the task would be monumentally more difficult if only the generated PDFs were available. So both are right at the same time.

[1] https://info.arxiv.org/help/faq/whytex.html#contextual

Edit: Genuine question, not rhetorical - I don't know how well it would work but it sounds like it should.

There used to be another showcase, called arxiv-vanity. They captured what happened pretty well with their farewell post on their homepage:

https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/

Well, that's terrifying. I mean, I knew it about undergrads, but I sure hoped people going into grad school would be aware of the dangers of making your main contact with research, where subtle details are important, through a known-distorting filter.

(I mean, I'd still be kinda terrified if you said that grad students first encounter papers through LLMs. But if it is the front end for all knowledge they consume? Absolutely dystopian.)

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.

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] ?

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?

<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

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