Sebastian Rahtz wrote -- > > 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? As much as I care about any other large number of people doing things with documents, yes. > 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 I may not want to see mark-up (although I did not actaully say that: it depends a lot on what scren I am using, etc) but that is just me. I do not want to stop other people doing so if they wish to; I do not want them to curse me like I curse the people who think I should be encouraged to point at things with a mouse simply because someone thinks it is easier for me than other methods of communicating commands to my softeware. > 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.... Whilst I would not draw this conclusion I would very much like to do as you suggest, but if that is all we need then we should leave out the TeX bit and just: make an even better formatting engine This endeavour would start from the TeX formatting engines (note the plural) but not necessarily from any other parts of TeX > hence back to issues like > algorithms for float placement.... Oh please, yes please! No one ever sent me one yet. chris