I wish the meme about the supposed superiority of "declarative" languages would go away. They have tradeoffs, like everything else. "Make" is also declarative — and horrific.
TeX has plenty of warts by modern standards (and the LaTeX macro package even more so), but the suggestion that HTML+CSS work better for general layout use is ridiculous (the standards committee only heard that multi-column layouts are impossible without major hackery what, last year?). I tried docbook for a document a while ago, and it was horrible. SGML might be acceptable for machine generation, but not for human writing. The toolchain is even worse than TeX's, hard as that may be to believe.
A replacement for TeX would be fantastic, but its absence over the last 30 years suggests that it's difficult to get right and achieve critical mass.
TeX has plenty of warts by modern standards (and the LaTeX macro package even more so), but the suggestion that HTML+CSS work better for general layout use is ridiculous (the standards committee only heard that multi-column layouts are impossible without major hackery what, last year?). I tried docbook for a document a while ago, and it was horrible. SGML might be acceptable for machine generation, but not for human writing. The toolchain is even worse than TeX's, hard as that may be to believe.
A replacement for TeX would be fantastic, but its absence over the last 30 years suggests that it's difficult to get right and achieve critical mass.