Peter Schmitt 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 :-) careful, now. sgml (with all bells and whistles) has been tried, and no product has ensued: while it's possible in principle (cf all those silly arguments about turing completeness and what it means) it seems rather difficult in practice. xml is, of course, a different matter, having been designed to address these parsing issues. > But, of course, LaTeX is more friendly to the user than HTML > -- that's the penalty one has to pay ... i boggle (is it _really_ peter saying this? ;-) i had an argument earlier today with a research student here, where i was suggesting that the perceived difficulty of html was due to his lack of familiarity with it. as sebastian said (while i was in my seminar), the proof of this pudding is the number of authors in the respective languages. i continue to believe that there remains a future for a latex-like language, but it's impossible to claim that it's going to be the majority's choice. robin