hans aberg writes: > Well, speaking of an _authoring_ language, one would expect [...] > > So from this point of view, HTML and PDF and DVI are incomplete. umm, in iso 8613[*] terms, pdf and dvi are `final forms', the output of a formatting process. pace various people's odd ideas, they are not (as a practical proposition) intended to be edited. as authoring languages they are complete crocks (though people do do daft things: i have a friend who regularly writes bits of exam papers in postscript...). html is a `revisable form'. indeed, some people (such as i, who have no other tools than emacs) author in it[*]. but it's an awful authoring language, even with the sorts of dances i can persuade emacs to do for me.... however, html _does_ in principle provide an awful lot of what one might like. it fails in its lack of stable extensibility ... which is what this crazy argument started from (but, shock horror, in terms of latex's stability and extensibility). robin [*] see, e.g., ISO/IEC 8613-1:1994 Information technology -- Open Document Architecture (ODA) and interchange format: Part 1: Introduction and general principles [**] and regularly get emailed abuse about the lack of tricksiness in my output...