> Were I a betting person I would put quite a lot of money on there
 > being a lot of people using comparatively dumb editors to enter
 > LaTeX (and AMSTeX) code in 3 years time.

yes, but `a lot' could be the same number of people now programming
use MS Basic on their 8086 computers. do you care about them?

 > I should like, for myself, a highly configurable, intelligent but
 > liberal, teachable editor/environment that could understand my
 > pathetic attempts to create masterpieces of mathematics and that could
 > input/output in any reasonable standard format.
so as i suspected, you dont wan't to see markup at all! you are now
saying TeX is an _interchange_ format, like RTF, which humans don't
read or write. Thats a whole different kettle of fish

 > things will become more diverse and complex rather than less; but that
 > is not a reason for not getting stuck in and producing useful
 > standards and tools to make them accessible and useful.

the conclusion i would draw from that is the best we can do is make
(La)TeX an even better formatting engine, since that is the one thing
we all agree that it is needed for. hence back to issues like
algorithms for float placement....

Sebastian