HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)

If the Unicode consortium would spend less time and effort on emoji and more on making the most common/important mathematical symbols and notations available/renderable in plain text, maybe we could move past the (LA)TeX/PDF marriage. OpenType and TrueType now (edit: for well over a decade, actually) support the necessary conditional rendering required to perform complicated rendering operations to get sequences of Unicode code points to display in the way needed (theoretically, anyway) and with fallback missing-glyph-only font family substitution support available pretty much everywhere allowing you to seamlessly display symbols not in your primary font from a fallback asset (something like Noto, with every Unicode symbol supported by design, or math-specific fonts like Cambria Math or TeX Gyre, etc), there are no technical restrictions.

I’ve actually dug into this in the past and it was never lack of technical ability that prevented them from even adding just proper superscript/subscript support before, but rather their opinion that this didn’t belong in the symbolic layer. But since emoji abuse/rely on ZWJ and modifiers left and right to display in one of a myriad of variations, there’s really no good reason not to allow the same, because 2 and the squares symbol are not semantically the same (so it’s not a design choice).

An interesting (complete) tangent is that Gemini 3 Pro is the only model I’ve tested (I do a lot of math-related stuff with LLMs) that absolutely will not under any circumstances respect (system/user) prompt requests to avoid inline math mode (aka LATeX) in the output, regardless of whether I asked for a blanket ban on TeX/MathJax/etc or when I insisted that it use extended unicode codes points to substitute all math formula rendering (I primarily use LLMs via the TUI where I don’t have MathJax support, and as familiar as I once was with raw TeX mathematical notations and symbols, it’s still quite easy to confuse unrendered raw output by missing something if you’re not careful). I shared my experiment and results here – Gemini 3 Pro would insist on even rendering single letter constants or variables as $k$ instead of just k (or k in markdown italics, etc) no matter how hard I asked it not to (which makes me think it may have been overfit against raw LATeX papers, and is also an interesting argument in favor of the “VL LLMs are the more natural construct”): https://x.com/NeoSmart/status/1995582721327071367?s=20

The whole "we need latex because of math" thing has been nothing more than a bad excuse for a very long time. Math notation is too varied to include in Unicode (some papers have to invent new notation!), but even if we had it, authors would still insist on latex. You can already make responsive and largely accessible papers that render to HTML, with latex familiar syntax for equations, bibtex for references and all the footnotes/figures/tables/captions you might want.

But authors still refuse. It's not real science if the layout isn't two-column, written in an old serif font, tables and figures float randomly disconnected from their reference points, code isn't syntax higlighted and has completely nonsensical line breaks... If the reader wants to read it on a phone, or needs to change to font to be larger or more legible, they're not a real scientist and don't deserve to read real papers.

Seriously, what the fuck?? Even the economists are laughing at us with their MS Word and third-party cloud-based bibliography plugin subscription.