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In-Reply-To:  Your message of "Tue, 15 Dec 1998 22:16:20 +0100." 
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Date:         Wed, 16 Dec 1998 09:47:36 +0000
From: Robin Fairbairns <Robin.Fairbairns@CL.CAM.AC.UK>
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To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
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Subject:      Re: portable LaTeX
Status: R

hans aberg writes:

> Well, speaking of an _authoring_ language, one would expect [...]
>
> So from this point of view, HTML and PDF and DVI are incomplete.

umm, in iso 8613[*] terms, pdf and dvi are `final forms', the output
of a formatting process.  pace various people's odd ideas, they are
not (as a practical proposition) intended to be edited.  as authoring
languages they are complete crocks (though people do do daft things: i
have a friend who regularly writes bits of exam papers in
postscript...).

html is a `revisable form'.  indeed, some people (such as i, who have
no other tools than emacs) author in it[*].  but it's an awful
authoring language, even with the sorts of dances i can persuade emacs
to do for me....

however, html _does_ in principle provide an awful lot of what one
might like.  it fails in its lack of stable extensibility ... which is
what this crazy argument started from (but, shock horror, in terms of
latex's stability and extensibility).

robin

[*] see, e.g., ISO/IEC 8613-1:1994 Information technology -- Open
Document Architecture (ODA) and interchange format: Part 1:
Introduction and general principles

[**] and regularly get emailed abuse about the lack of tricksiness in
my output...