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Message-ID:  <13942.19332.398189.953258@srahtz>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
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In-Reply-To:  <v03110701b29bf1d9cd58@[130.237.37.57]>
Date:         Tue, 15 Dec 1998 11:44:04 +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

Hans Aberg writes:
 > The display of the WWW browser itself must use a language of some kind to
 > display its graphicla information, links and such (telling where each spot
 > is supposed to be)

why do you think there is an intermediate language? Netscape under
Windows, say, reads a CSS spec, and renders it by internal calls to
the underlying Windows GDI. there is no hook there which you can
attach to.

 > display information. Turn that more basic language into a byte code; then
what is this obsession with "byte codes"??

 > any other language (DVI, PS, PDF, ...) can display by first converting to
 > that language: For every new such language, you then need a plugin that can
 > do the translation, but that is all.
IF the browsers have a `byte code' layer and an API, then fine.

 > byte-code language. The point is that it is platform independent.

I suspect you'd be better off using a nice graphical markup language
like PGML or Microsoft's equivalent (--> SVG, when W3C complete their
work). Thats the XML equivalent of
PostScript, and you can expect browsers to support it directly

sebastian