It is not the plaintext nature of LaTeX that limits it.
It is the stacking of macro's on top of macro's and the fact that there is no 'looking back'. Any kind of 'look back' functionality requires a second pass and the .aux file.
I think something like HTML / CSS would make a lot more sense. Essentially, we already have this atm (you have a document file, and a document type).
An alternative would be some extension of markdown with a separate file for display logic. I fear it would be hard to get that extensible enough though.
It is the stacking of macro's on top of macro's and the fact that there is no 'looking back'. Any kind of 'look back' functionality requires a second pass and the .aux file.
I think something like HTML / CSS would make a lot more sense. Essentially, we already have this atm (you have a document file, and a document type).
An alternative would be some extension of markdown with a separate file for display logic. I fear it would be hard to get that extensible enough though.