On this, I think we can just agree to disagree. For one, TeX did not try and make an arbitrary distinction between style language and content language. So, it is both. Period. LaTeX did try and layer the style to a separate file, but still the same language.
Contrast this with the supposed HTML and CSS divide which has to later in a scripting language and all the joy they all enrich on each other. Is it any wonder that JSX is taking off?
Now, tooling is behind. But that is because it isn't cool to build up tooling on something that doesn't have the user base of a browser.
Yes, I know. That was my point. I concider that the problem and a major reason why it's still so hard to use and one reason why tooling sucks for it.
> JSX
... has nothing to do with HTML & CSS which are both quite happy if you don't use scripting at all. If you think JSX applies in any way here I posit you don't understand the problem space.
Apologies for the misdirection. I posit that JSX exists because having a separate scripting language (JS) from the display language (HTML) is actually a pain from the scripting point of view. So, yes, nothing to do directly with HTML & CSS, but everything to do with the mess that is all of them.
And this is highlighting where we agree to disagree. I consider it somewhat of a strength of TeX that it is a single language for what it does. Makes scripting it much easier to consider. (Far from easy, I grant.)
As for tooling. Tooling is almost always strictly a matter of labor. More people working with it would have produced tooling that was what people wanted. Consider how terrible the tooling for early web was.
But again, I do not think you are wrong, per se. It would take an empirical argument without appeal to beliefs to convince me that one is truly better than the other. I just happen to like the TeX way in absence of these experiments.
I'm not saying LaTex is bad just that putting it all into one system is why it is hard to use, pretty much only the domain of programmers and those who have to use it, and has awful tooling.
None of these things are impossible to solve for LaTex, but they do make it conceptually harder to detangle.
So we aren't disagreeing heavily. Sounds like the main difference is that i disagree that it is any technical achievement of the newer languages that makes them "better." Rather, my position is that it was more from resources. LaTeX just didn't have the resources to build around it.
I don't know how to test this hypothesis. I can present my reasoning for feeling it, though. And that is simply that the technical makeup of the current technologies is built on sand.
Javascript is a mess technical capabilities that is constantly getting frameworks rewritten to address previously solved by other framework's problems.
CSS is a beast when you get in the woods and is basically dominated by whoever has produced the most recent resetting sheet. More, it seems that you can pseudo script CSS things now, what with duration and other items making their way into the standard. (Or, just the :content meta where you can now author crap in the css....)
And HTML, the cornerstone, is a mess of different ways to nest things into pseudo xml. There was a push to make it legitimate XML, but that failed due to the fact that it wouldn't work.
Contrast with LaTeX which just doesn't have a gui. The equivalent of the "Inspector" tab. You seem to be claiming that this is not fixable, but I have some serious doubts on that claim. Especially since I didn't have it at the beginning of my web career, either.
Right, I'm not extolling the virtues of CSS/HTML from a technical standpoint (though they actually do quite well, given the problem space - they are unfairly maligned).
It's more about how they separate out the ideas conceptually - document structual markup + document layout styling.
LaTeX kind of does this in how most people use it but it bundles the ideas together which makes it very hard to reason about and complicates the space.
> You seem to be claiming that this is not fixable
Not at all! I'm saying it's not there yet and progress on that GUI/Inspector/software has been hampered by the above conceptual problems due to the design of the language.
They are solvable, of course, but LaTeX seems to go out of its way to make it harder to solve.
Contrast this with the supposed HTML and CSS divide which has to later in a scripting language and all the joy they all enrich on each other. Is it any wonder that JSX is taking off?
Now, tooling is behind. But that is because it isn't cool to build up tooling on something that doesn't have the user base of a browser.