After all TeX is all about high quality printing on paper.
So I don’t think there’s much merit arguing about what doesn’t exist any longer.
This distinction is important especially because people are notoriously confusing the two and expect web apps to be like websites and conversely implement websites with tech that is supposed to be used to build web applications bloating internet pipes with JS where HTML and CSS would be sufficient.
Beyond that, the distinction is purely arbitrary. Same tech stacks, same delivery methods, and the same client-side display tools.
I politely disagree, the problem is we have made websites a javascript hellscape with all that original intent broken by design.
Years ago I was never using the "print" command in browsers. I used the "save" command. But now the "save" command is useless for most sites, because the saved scripts frequently do not work offline or they do not work even online, but from local files. So the only alternative is "print", which is extraordinarily buggy in both Firefox and Chrome, but their developers do not give a ****, so there are many years or perhaps decades since printing in Firefox or Chrome renders completely incorrectly almost all Web pages.
As a workaround for the stupid rendering in Firefox and Chrome, I frequently print twice a Web page, once in Portrait and once in Landscape, because the corrupted parts of the printed page will typically occur in different locations. Moreover, I may have to fiddle with other printing parameters, e.g. whether to print backgrounds or not, or with different margins and paper sizes, because it is unpredictable which settings will work best with a given site.
And I politely disagree right back. My particular problem with this has to do with purchasing. When I make a purchase at work, I need something I can attach to a purchase request as a quote. Note that this is often not a formal quote, but rather evidence of what whatever I want to buy will cost.
A simple way to do this is to print a shopping cart to PDF and attach that to the PR. Some web sites do this just fine and others do it horribly. They should do better.
Maybe you could capture the full height of the website as a screenshot? There are extensions that do this, and there is some degree of native support for the feature nowadays.
Thankfully, most of the web sites for which I want to do this — banks and other financial institutions, but others also — have easy ways to create printable receipts because they know that people want to do things like this.
And you can disagree, but when I come across some e-commerce site where printing what I want or need to PDF doesn't work because the site just makes a horrible unreadable mess out of it, I think, well here's a set of "web developers" who are just not good at what they do.
(And yes, I fall back to screen shots when I must.)
This kind of fairly idealistic thinking is so far from the ordinary web development norm that you have to go past "supporting that version of IE with 0.7% market share" to get to it.
Most "I need a printout of this" information is timely and dynamic and needs fixing in a physical form.
A print stylesheet seems like something you could get an LLM to write.
I mean, everyone has their own workflow preferences so I wouldn’t criticise you for wanting to use AI in your own personal set up. But it feels like your two statements there should be moral opposites of each other.
But to expect every author also upload a PDF? I mean, TeX is great for what it is, but there's a reason _the web_ adapted print stylesheets.
Even if (La)TeX (or Typst, or Postscript or anything else) were easy to learn, you're left with maintaining 2 copies or a compilation system which is also a challenge.
Even now this is not that uncommon; I have worked with an entrepreneur masking significant dyslexia in just the last five years. Printability was just something he needed so he could properly scrutinise.
Print is still an accessibility thing, I think.