There’s nothing too big here, I just wanted to give some blog updates.

1. I’ve changed some of the styles on here, as you may have noticed—in particular, I’ve changed the main font to be Stix2, a pretty good workhorse serif font.

2. I’ve refactored some of the stylesheets, making better use of variables and stuff like that, so I’m going to move on later to changes between light and dark themes—that is, you can change between a light or dark theme, depending on either the preferences in your operating system or a button.

3. I’ve slightly changed the colorscheme, since the grey on offwhite look was just not very good. The background is black for now, though it might change in the future.

This website, as you can read in my about page, is written in Hugo, as well as—not at all shockingly—HTML and CSS. While I love what the web can do, it’s actually an incredibly limiting way to do typesetting. Because of the fact that there aren’t any true physical margins in the same way that, say, a page of paper does, it’s actually much harder to make use of space. Take for example footnotes, which I’ve used quite liberally in some of my blog posts—because there aren’t separate pages at the end, they just wind up going all the way to the bottom of the page. This can make them, to put it lightly, a total pain in the ass to read.

So, the best way to fix this—since modern screens have a lot of unused horizontal space—is with margin notes, margin figures, and other similar margin elements. However, HTML doesn’t support this by default,¹ and is, in general, a huge pain in the ass to implement, as the long blog posts by Charlsy Yang, Koos Looijestein, and Gwern have demonstrated. Worse still, there’s a very real possibility that making something like an margin note would break accessibility guidelines, which I’m not super keen on purposefully doing.

Web typesetting in general is just really annoying to do, and I find it really annoying. I’m not going to say that paper is perfect and we should all just RETVRN TO TYPEWRITERS, but it is easier to do something with a proper amount of constraints. Web typesetting doesn’t have those constraints, and instead requires you to think about tons of different edge-cases all the time—in essence, you need to calculate the orbit of the moon around the earth while taking into account all of the other planets in the solar system. That said, I can’t just give a blanket “we should make something like the web but simpler,” because that opens a whole other can of worms. Something like Gemini, and its associated gemtext markup language,² is limited to a fault, without anything in the way of, say, math, images, or even italicized text. There isn’t an easy way to make HTML but pleasant to work with, because that new standard would fall victim to being another standard. (I saw XKCD 927 flash in your head—you’re very clever and original, just like me.)

Moreover, there are other reasons that you might want to use more traditional typesetting practices, citations being a big reason. I love inline hyperlinks (see footnote 2), but they are inherently subject to linkrot—websites can, and do, go down without warning. Likewise, they don’t provide the same sort of information that a traditional citation does. If a website goes down, where are you supposed to find it? A regular citation can give you all of that information—I could crack open my copy of Marx’s Capital and track down almost any of the cited sources there, even if it would be tedious. With a hyperlink, you’re not left with that information, though this is really relevant only if you’re trying to stay up to academic standards.³

Apologies if all this was just scatterbrained bitching without any real point, I just got really annoyed working on my website.

Anyways, check out some of the stuff that I can do. Since the MathJax 4 update came out, I can write math in STIX 2, like this $\mathbf{x}^\intercal \, M \, \mathbf{x} \geq 0$, or, for example, $$ \int_{\partial \Omega} f = \theta \, dW_t + X_t \, dt + \nabla V(\mathbf{Z}) \, d\mathbf{Z} \,. $$ None of those equations meant anything in particular—I just wanted to write them to demonstrate that I can write equations and they match the text, which is an alien concept to most people on the web.

That’s actually something that most people seem to be allergic to on the web: making the math and text fonts the same. People will mix serif fonts with computer modern, because that’s just what’s bundled with MathJax and KaTeX by default. Math typesetting is really, really hard, as I expounded in my blogposts on Typst, and throwing The Web into the mix makes it even harder.