> The primary aim is to serve the community with the outputs we have, while we improve the coverage and fidelity of our generator.

Could you explain what you mean here? Who is "we" - I assume ar5iv? "while we improve the coverage and fidelity of our generator" <-- does this mean this is a temporary situation, and in the future multiple versions of the paper will be available?

Certainly, sorry for the confusion.

There's actually multiple "we", since there are two institutions involved, and one foil character - I'm the only one responsible for ar5iv "the website", in a personal capacity.

The fidelity of the generator has the "we" of the team behind LaTeXML, the TeX-to-HTML conversion tool. That is in many ways the most important project to remember here, as that is what we want to actively improve to a point where it is "good enough" in creating HTML over the entirety of arXiv.

The institution hosting the website, and wanting to "serve a community" is KWARC, a research group at the university of FAU-Erlangen in Germany. There are all kinds of projects and services brewing on that end, which have interplay with the HTML data behind ar5iv, but are not directly on the site.

And as to all of us reading HN, I think we are actually interested in arXiv itself being maximally useful. And so is the ar5iv site - it's a temporary deployment, that really is aiming to reintegrate back into the arxiv.org site, and general infrastructure.

If/when that happens is unclear, but in the meantime there is a lot of improvements that can be made, both in what HTML can be generated, deciding what the markup of scientific documents ought to be in the first place, as well as gaining some insights for what new problems arXiv would encounter if they served HTML.

Oh, and the last question - yes, if arXiv integrates the feature, they will be able to serve any of the versions, including the most recent one.

I can technically implement that, but I really don't want to, as I see it as crossing a certain line. Seeing ar5iv as a limited, constrained, service is a good thing - I think it clearly communicates that I do not want to compete with arXiv.