> If the history of a scientific article would be done from conception
 > to publishing, I would say it starts as a pure Plain TeX document, as
 > there are mostly mathematical formulas plus some unstructured
 > comments explaining  what the formulas are about, separated by

you seem have a very blinkered view of what a `scientific article' is!
i have written many articles as an archaeologist and computer
scientist (mosty of them very bad), and I have (I think) never used a
mathematical formula.

 > else you like (PostScript or PDF?). But trying to write a scientific
 > article from the scratch directly into SGML would be absurd, in my
i compose in LaTeX. i have also composed in XML. really, very little
difference, just a matter of < instead of \. Indeed, Phil Taylor has
promoted a style of TeX coding which is <..> anyway. when i asked him
the other week, he agreed it was _nearly_ parseable against a DTD.

sebastian