Hello,

I spoke too soon, some small “syntactic extensions” will be useful for user
input. For example, since I’ll need normalized date input, while I could use:

  \date{<year>}[<month>][<day>]

it would be better to use:

  \date{<iso-8601 date>}

It’s my understanding that such sorts of formatted input is expected, given
that xparse provides the argument processor facility.


2018-10-26, Will Robertson:
> Apologies for my slow reply, it’s been a busy few weeks here.

No need for apologies, I understand everyone is busy. I just replied to myself
in the vein of StackExchange and for the sake of contributing something other
than questions.

> In general, for your purposes it’s good to “abuse” xtemplate where you need
> to so that we can see what needs to change.

I’ll continue experimenting with things and see what works and what doesn’t.


2018-10-26, Frank Mittelbach:
> to add to Will's comments, way back I tried myself as using xtemplate 
> for that kind of purpose too and it might be helpful to to have a look 
> at what I have done back then and see if that fits your thinking or 
> gives you some other ideas.
>
> The code from that is in
> 
> https://github.com/latex3/latex3/tree/master/xpackages/xfrontm

I’m currently reading through this and I think I have some related ideas;
although xfrontm is more evolved than my initial thoughts.

> My architecture vision talk in India gives a good overview on that
> 
> https://www.latex-project.org/publications/indexbyyear/2011/

I’ve watched this talk a couple of times now and am very excited by its ideas
and the possibilities it offers. I’ll keep this in mind as I work on the class.


—Kelly