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You know how we argue about stuff like bracket styles and virtually identical text editors? Other professions have their own Very Important Debates(TM).
Doesn't typography overlap quite significantly with web design ? Isn't that the profession of many of the people on this site ?

Lack of knowledge of these things is one of the reasons that much of the text people read every day is presented with a system (HTML/CSS) that has complete disregard for typography[1]. Unlike LaTeX for example where you can set your inter sentence spacing to whatever you want, because Knuth took the time to learn about typography and create a system that has the flexibility required to lay out text properly[2].

[1] smallcaps, kerning, spacing, justification, the list goes on and on

[2] for pretty much any value of 'properly' you can imagine

There is however a problem with interactive devices: any type-setting is doomed because the setter has no control on the output.

Knuth could do TeX because the aim is to produce fixed-typed text (barring proportionality). Not so on the Internet. It is not that the web standards despise typography: it is that the web is not a place in which to SET (which implies "fix") types. And that is why it is so hard to get a compelling, attractive web page.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-varian... http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/#font-kerning-prop https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/word-spacin... https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/letter-spac... https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text-align http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-text/#text-justify0

It's not that HTML/CSS was created with a disregard for typography, it's simply that typography was not the intended purpose of HTML. CSS (and HTML 4 & 5) is largely an attempt to allow principles of typography to be applied to HTML without breaking the original use (after all, LaTeX and typography in general requires a very rigid definition of the output for it to work properly, which you can never have with the browser as your target platform; in itself something very different from what was available when HTML was originally designed).

In principle, there's no reason why web browsers couldn't incorporate the same typesetting algorithms that LaTeX uses. In fact it's quite practical to write a HTML to LaTeX converter and get quite good results out of it (I'm doing this right now).

The only caveat is that you don't get the same level of control that you have with LaTeX, in cases where the default behaviour is different to what you want.