I agree that ideally we should also provide an option to render into HTML/markdown. But for practical reasons it's necessary to have a digital artifact that matches the printed artifact in page and line numbering.
I disagree that "The main asset of Lamport's LaTeX is its high quality formatting for printed artifacts." The main asset for the scientific community is that it lets them (relatively) easily write research papers that are dense with figures and mathematics. (And these are typically viewed online, via arXiv.)
> But for practical reasons it's necessary to have a digital artifact that matches the printed artifact in page and line numbering.
Unless you are distilling to PDF, this is not viable. But I assume you mean PDF output, then you need a screen form factor that is paper-like, like an iPad or some other letter/A4 style tablet.
You can manipulate math for on-screen documents as well (MathML), but (a) it isn't very viable to use them for both formats and (b) people who pursue math publications mostly love the focus of paper formats (even if they view them on a screen as above).
"But I assume you mean PDF output, then you need a screen form factor that is paper-like, like an iPad or some other letter/A4 style tablet."
Why do I need this? Concretely, I go to the arXiv. I look at the paper a bit on my laptop. Then I print it and read it away from my laptop. The printed version has the same pagination and layout as the screen version.
> Then I print it and read it away from my laptop. The printed version has the same pagination and layout as the screen version.
You can totally do that, and that is the most common case. However, if you had a letter-sized device perfect for viewing PDF papers, it wouldn't be "weird" anymore, the pagination and layout would just feel like a good fit.
I disagree that "The main asset of Lamport's LaTeX is its high quality formatting for printed artifacts." The main asset for the scientific community is that it lets them (relatively) easily write research papers that are dense with figures and mathematics. (And these are typically viewed online, via arXiv.)