Message-ID:  <199812141543.KAA11333@hilbert.math.albany.edu>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Date:         Mon, 14 Dec 1998 10:43:19 -0500
From: "William F. Hammond" <hammond@CSC.ALBANY.EDU>
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: portable LaTeX
Status: R

David Carlisle writes:

: > I have been reliably informed that XSL does not allow specifications
: > that are expressive enough to do this job (basically since it knows
: > nothing about maths, in the sense that it has no concept of arithmetic).
:
: If you compare the first draft submission of XSL to the first working
: draft of XSL 1.0, which came out only a few months later, you will
: see that they are essentially completely different languages.
: XSL is a rapidly moving target, and currently it is moving behind the
: closed doors of W3C working group processes, so there is not a lot of
: point worrying now about any particular lack of features. You just have
: to have faith that it will be alright on the day.  ...

An XSL that is capable of transforming a reasonable authoring DTD,
relative to which documents can be marked up for those who so choose
in LaTeX-like notation, to HTML-extended-by-MathML (should I say
HTML-Voyager-extended-by-MathML?) would be great!

(Re Voyager: http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html-in-xml/  see also Dave Raggett's
"tidy".)

Let's hope that it happens.  Any target date?

Of course, if browsers are not equipped to handle the full power of
this new XSL, then it remains an authoring vehicle only, parallel to
many other possible in-house vehicles.

If this new XSL can be assumed reliably available at client sites,
then more things become possible.

For one thing the requirements for good browser display are somewhat
less burdensome than the requirements of segment clipping for
processing by computer algebra systems.

There would then be a number of ways for a given author to proceed
using one or more XMLs along with different stylesheets in order to
distribute the processing burden in such a way as to avoid processing
that is not needed.

For example, one could serve an XML document with a
display-stylesheet; the document may still contain enough information
so that more elaborate client site processing with another stylesheet
would enable math segments to be clipped into a computer algebra
system.

                                   -- Bill