Message-Id: <199402022118.AA28265@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Wed, 2 Feb 1994 21:16:44 +0000
From: Paul Taylor <pt@DOC.IC.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: On the death of \footheight
Status: R

Sebastian says I'm being negative about LaTeX2e compatibility/native nodes.

I'm sorry.  Please read my comment as a prediction without value judgement.

The most important thing is that we (are about to) have an "official"
standard LaTeX which includes the NFSS.

"Compatibility mode" is a good idea, because it is a relatively clean way
of collecting in one place the junk from local LaTeX variants.

Now it is clear that Frank, Rainer and co have certain ideas about the
way they think LaTeX should go and how people should compose documents
with it.  For the sake of argument, let's agree that these ideas are
good and assume that native 2e embodies them.  From this we deduce that
they would like people to switch to it as soon as possible.

What would make it most likely that they will do this?

I suggest that the principle is that the differences should be minimised,
kept independent and generally such that converting one aspect (macro
package or typing habits) does NOT prevent one from going backwards
or force one to go all the way.

In my experience it is very difficult to get publishers and conference
organisers to fix bugs in their style files, let alone convert them to
new LaTeX versions.  These alone will force users to stay with compatibility
mode.

The last few lines of latex209.cmp DISABLE certain LaTeX2e commands. Why?
Apparently one is not even allowed to utter the name of God unless
one is a True Believer.  The most important of these commannds is
\usepackage, but that seems to be re-defined by article.cls.

The article, report and book styles (as I commented last week) change the
text area depending on \@ifcompatibility. This will also cause surprises
to users which seem rather unnecessary.

Please allow us to change one thing at a time.

Paul