At 08:56 -0500 1998/12/04, William F. Hammond wrote:
>About macros: your whole point of view here changes when you realize
>what you could be authoring.  Not only might you want to think about
>the paper target as an end format, but you also might want to think
>about the www target, the cataloging target, the making of provision
>for clipping segments into sophisticated processors (e.g., if MathML
>is a target), and who knows what else ultimately.  In writing for
>multiple presentation formats it is highly desirable to avoid
>target-conscious bifurcation (such as one sees occasionally in
>Texinfo).  The handling of different target presentation formats is
>done by processors.  Before any serious processing is done your macros
>need to be fully expanded.  (We don't see that expansion with our eyes
>when using TeX-based systems.)

The way I see it, this is what really drives the development of an
authoring language capable of describing more structure: When authoring a
manuscript with potential multiple uses, one should never produce several
different specialized copies, as it is difficult to keep them consistent.

The macro based systems are in this respect inferior, as it is unclear what
the structure is: Is before, during or after expansion? What about the
syntactic information that authors normally use? What about other
contextual information?

So this will eventually force the devlopment of more advanced authoring
languages.

  Hans Aberg
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