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References: <s.rahtz@ELSEVIER.CO.UK>
            <199811051318.OAA24936@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>
Message-ID:  <13889.44009.783830.780636@srahtz>
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In-Reply-To:  <199811051318.OAA24936@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>
Date:         Thu, 5 Nov 1998 13:45:13 +0000
From: Sebastian Rahtz <s.rahtz@ELSEVIER.CO.UK>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
              <LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Subject:      Re: Quotes and punctuation
Status: R

Peter Schmitt writes:
 > The relevant comparison in this case is with _LaTeX markup_
 >   ( TeX could parse SGML/XML as easily as any other program :-)

people _say_ that, but one notes that it has never been done, to my
knowledge (and I mean beyond the constrained environment of eg
typehtml)

 > But, of course, LaTeX is more friendly to the user than HTML
 >    -- that's the penalty one has to pay ...
 >
what does HTML have to do with it?

even wrt HTML, history is not on your side. millions and millions of
people write HTML happily every day, a tiny proportion write
LaTeX. what does that suggest?

anyway, there *is* a point to my thread; which is that while (La)TeX can
do the typesetting job, its a gross *input* language; if you only
talk to the formatting engine ((La)TeX) through a constrained  channel
(XML as input, stylesheet for styling), you won't meet half so many
problems

possibly i digress. I feel the heavy breathing of Frank and Chris.

Sebastian