Message-ID:  <199908311406.KAA15210@hilbert.math.albany.edu>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Date:         Tue, 31 Aug 1999 10:06:35 -0400
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: Standard journal macros
Status: R

Joerg Knappen <KNAPPEN@alpha.ntp.springer.de> writes:

> Phillip Helbig schrieb:
>
> > What are the prospects for coming up with some standard journal macros,
[snip]
> We (i. e. Jens Kloecker, Michael Piotrowski, Frank Holzwarth and JKn)
> want to develop a standard _scientific article_ class in a BOF session
> at EuroTeX99 to be hold in Heidelberg from September 20--24.
>
> We want to emphasize the idea of a document class as a markup
> language.

Don't you really want an SGML language (formally, "application") that
admits down-translation to LaTeX?  There's absolutely no reason why
you cannot have a markup user interface (MUI) for it that has the look
and feel of LaTeX.

The point is that not only do you get the down-translation for print
in LaTeX but also you can write (in the programming language of your
choice) translators to whatever other formats you wish to reach.  (Of
course, very clever things in this direction have been done using TeX,
the program, but I suspect that there is a limit to this approach.)

                                    -- Bill