[jerf]

Over the years many people have hypothesized that once WASM was really mature, it would become practical to fix the issues with web browser layout by sending down custom layout machines to users.

I would find it hilarious if LaTeX turned into a leader in that space. I doubt it could hold on to that. There's a lot of things that something designed from the beginning for web-like uses could probably improve on that would be capable of overcoming LaTeX. But I could see a world where it carves out a niche and holds on to that niche for a long period of time.

[LudwigNagasena]

Hard to imagine anything worse than LaTeX for web layout. Imagine resizing a page and waiting for the re-compilation of the whole page.

[nicoburns]

Running layout in WASM is already practical. A good demo is https://www.nicbarker.com/clay

The things you can't do are things like expose an accessibility tree (without a dummy DOM), interact with the system IME, and access system fonts.

[jerf]

I feel like it's fair to say that you have not "fixed the issues with browser layout" if you lose accessibility and input. System fonts I can live without, we can push our own, but those two things are a big deal.

Even input you might be able to hack around but accessibility is a big deal and the "hack" at that point is nearly to both lay it out in the browser and the supposed "fixed" layout system, and while that may work in some sense I again have lots of questions about whether that is really "fixed".

[nicoburns]

I mean, I agree it's not fixed. I guess I'm just saying it's not the layout engine that's the blocker.

FWIW, I actually think it would be much more valuable just to fix the spec and make CSS layout fast-by-default.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I added DVI support to NCSA Mosaic back in 1993-94, believing it to be a better format for "rich" documents than HTML or PDF.

Nobody else seemed convinced :(