Message-Id: <199401281654.AA16926@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
In-Reply-To:  <9401281636.AA07146@m1.cs.man.ac.uk> (message from Philip TAYLOR
              on Fri, 28 Jan 1994 16:30:01 GMT)
Date:         Fri, 28 Jan 1994 16:53:24 GMT
From: David Carlisle <carlisle@cs.man.ac.uk>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: form and content
Status: R

 > I do not think that Barbara, Mike or I are at odds at all: surely
 > Barbara is advocating that in (for example) documents intended for
 > TUGboat, the embedded markup is that defined by (say) TugBoat.Sty;
 > provided that that markup is distinct from, and not merely an
 > overlapping set with, the predefined (La)TeX macros, then Mike's
 > original proposition is fully complied with.  Only if
 > TUGboat-compliant markup was defined to require direct use of
 > (some) predefined (La)TeX macros would there be any conflict.
 > N'est-ce pas?

 >                                         ** Phil.

What you are advocating is that every journal that wants to accept
LaTeX as source code should invent its own markup, and ask users to
use that.

This means that

a) Users have to learn a new set of commands for each journal they
   use.

b) Moving a document, or document fragment, from one journal to
   another means major editing of the document.

This is bad.

It is much better to use the standard tags. Mike mentioned that this
may mean a style/package modifying enumerate or another `standard'
command. Yes, that is how LaTeX is supposed to be used. Most of these
list types are defined in the style, and a local style may  redefine
them (enumerate is a bad example here as most of the standard styles
use a definition in the kernel, but that is just an optimisation).

Now it may be that for production (or any:-) use, the standard tags
are not expresive enough. This is another problem, but the way to cure
it is to have a range of journals accepting the same extended markup
ie a defacto extension of the `standard LaTeX'. Here I am thinking of
things like the front-matter declarations in amsart \address, \email
etc. It would be a good thing if other classes supported the ams
extensions. We cant really add them to the `standard classes' because
of the usual compatibility problems.

All this is referring really to `document structure' tagging.
We all agree that it is better to define \filename in the preamble,
rather than putting {\tt /usr/lib/...} all over the document source.

David