| Everyone I know with minimal HTML skills that has ever struggled with LaTeX has eventually thought about it. A HTML-like templating language, provided with an ACM-style CSS stylesheet and math/graphic/wtv Javascript libraries does seem appealing but simple problems arise from this. Different browsers render different results, and that's not even remotely acceptable for a to-be-published paper; this lack of consistency is, to me, the greatest obstacle to that reality.
Even considering _very_ similar results on every browser, PDF export would still be incoherent, resulting in mis-pagination (empty pages), "read-while-selected" text and the usual PDF-export-from-format-X bugs. Using Javascript libraries to provide extensability is a clever design, but the same problems apply. I often find textual bugs (hidden text, text above/bellow flow) on websites that rely too much on web fonts, and that shouldn't happen by now (as some are reporting, even on the author's website). Too many factors come to play for this to go wrong, but it all comes down to different browser implementations of every single technology in this HTML/CSS/JS stack (and that's a lot to go wrong). So while it does seem appealing (give the form and I'll sign it!), I don't think HTML+CSS+JS is even near of getting that experience consistency that typesetting-heavy documents need. |