HTML and Page Styles
I've spent more time than I'd have thought possible getting a page in IE to look like the same page in Firefox. I'm sure this is no surprise to anyone doing web design - HTML is not really going to give you what you want, you've got to use CSS and then you get into the same realm that you were in back in the days of nroff/troff and LaTeX. What's wrong with these people?
When I did my thesis, it was not on a Mac - it was on the VAXen at Purdue. Additionally, there were standards you had to meet with the style and layout of your thesis - all the way down to section naming conventions (7.2.1, etc). I understand why Purdue wanted to do this - so all theses from there had the same look to them. Reasonable. To do this, there were massive macros and included files for troff and then you could run it through the Versatec for "laser-like" printing long before there were laser printers. You then had to cut and tape/paste your illustrations on separate pages so that it looked like it had all been done 'professionally'. This involved knowing the font sizes of everything, equations were a pain, figures needed to be planned out at the end of each chapter, it was a mess. But it was all we had.
Today, you'd use Word, or OpenOffice, or something, and include the images from some drawing program, and then ship it to a simple color laser and you're done.
So why, oh why, are we back to the days of specifying the intricate details of the rendering of text? The web, and specifically the web browsers, need to take a page from the word processing advances of the last 25 years and get with it. There needs to be a way to make all of this a lot simpler. Oh sure, if it's in the browser, then there are those that say Microsoft will make the rendering in IE of Word-built documents better, nicer, faster, etc. But that misses the point of the web these days. Today, it's not about static pages, it's about dynamic pages, and for that, you're not going to be able to use Word. You're still going to need Perl, PHP, Tomcat, WebObjects, etc. to pull in the data, and get it ready to show to the user. What I'm complaining about is the presentation markup that we have to use.
There are those that say it's all a matter of standards - get the right set of CSS files and everything is easily done from that. OK, there's something to that, but that's no different, really, than my grad school days. I was lucky to have the benefit of many other people making these troff templates, but I still had to do more typography than should have been necessary - or than is necessary today.
So we need to move the web forward with the lessons learned from the Word processor wars... get a format that does more than text layout - get page layout and make it a lot easier to use.