HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)

Why do we like HTML more than pdfs?

HTML rendering requires you to be connected to the internet, or setting up the images and mathJax locally. A PDF just works.

HTML obviously supports dynamic embedding, such as programs, much better but people just usually post a github.io page with the paper.

> HTML rendering requires you to be connected to the internet

Not really. One can always generate a self-contained html. Both CSS and JS (if needed) can be inline.

Why would html rendering require a network connection? It doesn't seem to on my machine.

Try opening a PDF on a phone screen.

epub 'just works' locally, and it's html under the hood.

I do it all the time to read papers. It's easy

True but the webdev idiom is injecting things such as mathjax from a cdn. I guess one can pre-render the page and save that, but that's kind of like a PDF already

Things like LaTeX equation rendering are hosted on a cdn

They can be but don't need to be. Any javascript can be localized like HTML and CSS.

That's fair, but imagine trying to get the average reader up to speed with something like npm.

You don't actually need npm either. You can literally just distribute everything - html, css, images and js in a zipped folder and open it locally.