William F. Hammond writes: > One can speculate about why SGML has been such a well kept secret. It > takes some work to appreciate it. That does not means that it does > not work nor that there are not reliable free tools nor that it would > not be fairly easy once we come to understand what it can do for us to > generate tools that are optimized for our purposes. you would have enjoyed a keynote at MT 98 by Brian "Scribe" Reid, where he basically repeated a talk he gave in 1981. it was an effective demonstration that being "right" and "working" markup stuff has zero impact on most people, who simply dont *want* generic markup... > Note: HTML 2.0, HTML 3.2, and HTML 4 all use different SGML declarations, > none the default. > and no HTML browser enforces validation, does it? > For this purpose one should perhaps view an SGML document type as a > decl/dtd pair. Of course, there is no decl for an XML. oh come. there is very much a decl for XML!!! its vital for parsing XML with SGML tools! > Obviously, to the extent that it is sensible to adopt different formats > for different purposes, it is desirable to have automatic processing to > faciliate conversions. Many such conversions should be fairly easy. ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^ by which we see why LaTeX is unpopular in production workflows. that translates to "10% failure" sebastian