Message-ID:  <009CEE38.AA220D80.20@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Date:         Sun, 8 Nov 1998 00:39:10 +0330
From: Roozbeh Pournader <rpnader@VAX.IPM.AC.IR>
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, HTML, and FrontPage
Status: R

Dear friends,
Being an audience a big time, I have found that this is indeed a very funny
mailing list (Seeing personal heros like frank, chris, sebastian, ...
joking, blaming each other, etc. :^)

But back to main problem, I can't think of what you are doing. I think this
SGML guideline is a very bad fall. Is it that way there, or your people
are really using emacs for HTML?!  Here in our university, except TeXies,
noone thinks of writing it by hand. They are using things like FrontPage,
and at best chance Netscape Composer. I can't resist living in a world
in which people use  icrosoft Garbage 2000' for writing TeX documents.
(Remember that journal's April joke, Knuth and Microsoft?) I am really
thinking about forgetting all efforts I have had to widen the
use of TeX and stuff in this part of the world, if LaTeX
is going this way, to get converted to a typesetting engine
used by some What You See Is All You've Got system.
(What about Microsft Word using the LaTeX engine?) Sorry for being rude,
but where are you going guys? Ok, Knuth liked the quick and dirty way,
but I don't like saying

   <DIV id="client-boyera" class="client">
   <P><SPAN class="client-title">Client information:</SPAN>
   some stuff</DIV>
   (quoted from HTML4.0 description from W3C)

which is more dirty.  Do you? (and remained a TeXie?)  Do you see it
user friendly and readable? Like LaTeX code?

Have you thought about mass users, about poor students preparing their
thesis, poor professors trying to concentrate on DIV and SPAN? I love
generic markup, but to what price? One's soul? ;)

Sorry for duckspeak, perhaps a Knuth's fan is a stranger here in TeXsoc :)

--Roozbeh Pournader,
  Sharif Univ. of Tech.,
  Tehran, IRAN.