Dumb question but what stops browsers from rendering TeX directly (aside from the work to implement it)? I assume it's more than just the rendering

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bo1024 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

You mean a display engine that works like an HTML renderer, except starting from TeX source instead of HTML source? I think you could get something that mostly works, but it would be a pain and at the end you wouldn't have CSS or javascript, so I don't think browser makers are interested.

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pwdisswordfishy an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

For starters, TeX is Turing-complete, and the tokenizer is arbitrarily reprogrammable at runtime.

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gbear605 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Browsers already support JavaScript anyway, so why not add another Turing-complete language into the mix? (Not even accounting for CSS technically being Turing-complete, or WASM, or …)

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ErroneousBosh an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Okay then, what would stop you rendering TeX to SVG and embedding that?

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

	▲	fooofw 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That would (mostly if not always) work in the sense of reproducing the layout of the pages, but would defeat the purpose of preserving the semantic information present in the TeX file (what is a heading, a reference and to what, a specific math environment, etc.) which is AFAIK already mostly dropped on conversion to PDF by the latex compiler.