>>>>> "BV" == Boris Veytsman <[log in to unmask]> writes: JS> From: Joachim Schrod <[log in to unmask]> JS> I still like its markup syntax much more than JS> XML for several reasons that are really off topic here. BV> Are you sure about the off topic part? I certainly would like to BV> know these reasons. OK, you've got me. The real answer would be a paper on the inability to do pure semantic markup in most situations, and about tag economy, i.e., the relationship of amount of markup in a document compared to the amount of text. It would also cover the necessity to have either full support by editing environments, or be able to enter and maintain markup manually in "standard" editors. Perhaps a presentation at a TeX conference... :-) But then, I'll try a shorter answer: -- Good typesetting needs ``micromarkup'', things that TeX does with "~", "\ ", "\,", etc. One can imagine semantic markup for many of these items, but the amount of markup definitions and the cognitive load to use the correct markup would be too high for almost all authors. There are also issues where semantic markup gets difficult, DEK's examples of ~ usage in the TeXbook provide good examples for that. Overall, I like the economy of input here: "~", "\,", or "--" are better to read and doesn't disturb the input as much as  , &spatium;, or –. Just imagine this email written with XML entities... ;-) IMHO, the length of a tag should be related to its importance: long tags for important things, short tags for unimportant but necessary stuff. -- Space handling in TeX is more "natural" than in XML. Not in macros, mind you, but in document text. As an example, I like to be able to use blank lines to separate paragraphs, as you can see in this email. This is a markup tradition since decades, and it has proven to be useful. As another example, I also like that multiple blanks collapse to one; that drives me mad in Word. -- I like the possibility to be able to introduce non-standard TeX markup for special situations. E.g., in the TeX Directory Standard, we used markup like \begin{tdsSummary} bibtex/ \BibTeX{} input files . bib/ \BibTeX{} databases . . base/ base distribution (e.g., \path|xampl.bib|) . . misc/ single-file databases . / name of a package \end{tdsSummary} In the document source, the directory structure is much easier to read and to maintain than bibtex \BibTeX{} input files [...] package name of a package In the current source, one spots errors immediately (e.g., how many s). That would be lost in XML markup. Of course, I'm biased since I designed the markup and wrote the macros. :-) SGML provided DATATAG for that, but this was thrown out to make the parser's writer life easier. Umpf, how many parser writers do we have, compared with the number of authors? -- TeX math markup is easier to write and to read then MathML. Mathematicians can also use its flexibility to introduce arbitrary new expressions in their "natural language math". -- Editor support for (La)TeX source input is better than for XML. Actually, this is a very difficile and difficult topic that would need a paper in itself. Please note that this reflects my current view on the state of available tools; there's nothing to prevent anybody creating better XML editors -- they're promised since years, but they don't arrive. Actually, there are good XML document editors like Framemaker; but they're not as platform-independent as I would need them. (For the record, I tried many editors, and currently use psgml-mode in XEmacs. But it's not as good as AUC-TeX.) -- An often cited reason to use XML markup instead of TeX is the better support for validation and transformation of XML documents. But IMHO this is overemphasized, it is not needed as often as we discuss it. Most XML documents that I've seen are not even conformant to some schema, therefore one needs special transform scripts for more document classes that one thinks at the start of an XML project. This is from my practical experience in introducing XML in multinational large companies for mission-critical documents. There it was even very hard to achieve agreement on structures for formal documents like service level agreements -- the ad-hoc markup that may be used for informal documents is good for nothing. Hell, corporate users even don't use Word document styles when they're available and prefer to klick on their bold and italics button or change the type size directly. That's the reality I'm doing business in. Of course, there are XML validators out there -- one only has to fight with the inability to express completely sensible document structures in DTDs or schemas. The resulting document structure definitions are either very complex or very generic. Style sheets for complex schemas are very hard to write, e.g., that's one of the reasons why we don't have good support for high-quality Docbook output. Validation of very generic structures doesn't bring enough advantages, then valid documents are still nonsense. Last, but not least: If markup validation is really so important, one can and should spend effort to make a TeX validator available. There are several TeX parser implementations out there -- I wrote one myself in two weeks. (Btw, presented at the TUG conference in Santa Barbara, years ago.) They can be utilized with sensible effort. -- Actually, IMO the main disadvantage of TeX markup is the shortage of skillfull people in the job market to implement that markup. That makes any manager worth his salary shy away from TeX. For me, that's the main reason to use XML, I find more people with the needed skills. But it's late and I should stop here. I hope you got an impression of my viewpoint. As I've written above, a full elaboration is beyond the scope of this email discussion. Cheers, Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Joachim Schrod Email: [log in to unmask] Roedermark, Germany ``How do we persuade new users that spreading fonts across the page like peanut butter across hot toast is not necessarily the route to typographic excellence?'' -- Peter Flynn