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Message-ID:  <18806.22059.626422.132557@morse.mittelbach-online.de>
Date:         Tue, 20 Jan 2009 23:54:35 +0100
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From: Frank Mittelbach <frank.mittelbach@LATEX-PROJECT.ORG>
Subject: Re: Key points of LaTex3
To: LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE
In-Reply-To:  <68c491a60901200152y55297cc3wa784e4082ceb5e3f@mail.gmail.com>
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Status: R

Martin

 > 2009/1/20 Joseph Wright <joseph.wright@morningstar2.co.uk>:
 > > I've had a go at summarising the key aims of LaTeX3, as I understand
 > > them, on  my blog (http://www.texdev.net).  I'd be interested to know
 > 
 > Very interesting, thanks.
 > 
 > However, most of these aims bring no direct benefit for the user,
 > while other areas where LaTeX is sorely showing it's age, e.g.
 > hyperref, are missing. I think any LaTeX3 release without a direct
 > integration of hyperref's features will not attract many users. The
 > same goes for document classes (e.g. KOMA) and a much better
 > integration of utf8 and fonts.

you are absolutely right. And as I said in my talk in Cork last year, all of
these things need to come together or else the effort is going to be down the
drain.

However, we are talking different levels. There is a programming level
(dealing with the peculiarities  of TeX (and our attempt to normalizing them
somewhat) - which is the low-level expl3. This is something that I hope we are
able to finish off fairly soon, so that it gets more or less written in stone
(for a while at least). On top of that need to come a layer that provides
stuff like hyperref and utf8 support (builtin rather than put on top after the
fact) so that the top layer, ie the class  design level can directly use that
(or rather essentially gets it for free.

frank