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	["886" "Mon" "9" "November" "1998" "09:35:54" "+0000" "Sebastian Rahtz" "s.rahtz@ELSEVIER.CO.UK" nil "25" "Re: Mark-up languages" "^Date:" nil nil "11" nil "Mark-up languages" nil nil nil]
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From: Sebastian Rahtz <s.rahtz@ELSEVIER.CO.UK>
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Subject:      Re: Mark-up languages
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Mark Steinberger writes:
 >
 > But you can't write MathML
as i said before, thats what structured editors are for

 > and XML in general has no macros, correct?
 >
 > It's horrible to contemplate writing in a language without macros.
 >
maybe you should expand on this. i find myself using macros *less*
in documents these days, as i appreciate their disadvantages. of
course i use short cuts (\def\X{this thing i am writing about}), but
more complex stuff I delegate to the style file, and add another
element to the DTD (as it were).

as an example, I am in the middle of a book; we don't write
\textsf(Perl)\index{Perl}, we write (of course) \PLanguage{Perl}. if
that was in XML, I'd write <plang>Perl</plang>, and have it in a
customization layer in the DTD [1].

Sebastian

[1] your DTD has no customization possibility? then argue it with the
designer, not the XML/SGML concept.