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References: <199811301413.JAA17823@hilbert.math.albany.edu>
Message-ID:  <13922.45865.691998.450110@srahtz>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
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In-Reply-To:  <199811301413.JAA17823@hilbert.math.albany.edu>
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 15:00:57 +0000
From: Sebastian Rahtz <s.rahtz@ELSEVIER.CO.UK>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
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To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
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Subject:      Re: portable LaTeX
Status: R

William F. Hammond writes:
 > One can speculate about why SGML has been such a well kept secret.  It
 > takes some work to appreciate it.  That does not means that it does
 > not work nor that there are not reliable free tools nor that it would
 > not be fairly easy once we come to understand what it can do for us to
 > generate tools that are optimized for our purposes.
you would have enjoyed a keynote at MT 98 by Brian "Scribe" Reid, where
he basically repeated a talk he gave in 1981. it was an effective
demonstration that being "right" and "working" markup stuff
has zero impact on most people, who simply dont *want* generic markup...

 > Note: HTML 2.0, HTML 3.2, and HTML 4 all use different SGML declarations,
 > none the default.
 >
and no HTML browser enforces validation, does it?

 > For this purpose one should perhaps view an SGML document type as a
 > decl/dtd pair.  Of course, there is no decl for an XML.
oh come. there is very much a decl for XML!!! its vital for parsing
XML with SGML tools!

 > Obviously, to the extent that it is sensible to adopt different formats
 > for different purposes, it is desirable to have automatic processing to
 > faciliate conversions.  Many such conversions should be fairly easy.
                           ^^^^^^^^^                       ^^^^^^

by which we see why LaTeX is unpopular in production workflows. that
translates to "10% failure"

sebastian