On Thu, 5 Nov 1998 14:03:13 MEZ Peter Schmitt <[log in to unmask]> wrote: : On Wed, 4 Nov 1998 17:09:45 GMT Sebastian Rahtz said: : >it was a joke. i was simplying that rendering of abstract things like : >`quoted text' need not involve quote marks; and that SGML/XML markup : >of abstract markup is much easier to parse than TeX.... : > : The relevant comparison in this case is with _LaTeX markup_ : ( TeX could parse SGML/XML as easily as any other program :-) : But, of course, LaTeX is more friendly to the user than HTML : -- that's the penalty one has to pay ... Yes, indeed, LaTeX is indeed friendly. It is important, however, to understand that HTML is just NOT a good authoring language and was never intended to be an authoring language. It is browser fodder designed for easy and efficient browser handling. XML, eXtensible Markup Language, is an extension of HTML to allow anybody to create a tag set. But XML is also NOT an authoring language. It is more or less correct to view every XML language as also an SGML language. Therefore, many SGML languages are also not good for authors. However, some are not too bad. I have been trying to make an SGML language, still in infancy, that is much closer to LaTeX than is any other SGML that I have *seen*. (I am only interested in "seeing" non-proprietary things.) While it is an infant, it is working well enough for me for now. I have concluded that it cannot be extremely close to LaTeX, but I can then write its command as "\foo{content}" just as if I am authoring LaTeX even though I am really creating SGML that will eventually be processed to LaTeX. I think that my conclusion about "distance" is related to the difficulties in the discussion here concerning authoring that we have been seeing. SGML is all about fast staged processing. It is not very much about getting on to paper. There is a very lucrative and apparently profitable industry out there lurking behind closed doors. I suggest that individuals should think in terms of multiple SGML transformations as pre-processing for LaTeX. Some industrial strength publishers *may* want to think in terms of multiple SGML transformations as pre-processing to TeX directly. I am wary of messing with Knuth's TeX. -- Bill