atw: Re: Replacing Word (Long...)
- From: "Anthony Self" <ASelf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2011 23:12:42 +1000
Hi James
I was the guilty culprit. What I meant was that the mark-up syntax that LaTeX
uses is special to LaTeX.
By contrast, the syntax used in HTML follows the SGML meta-language rules. SGML
is an ISO standard ISO 8879. New SGML-based languages are relatively rare. The
XML meta-language (itself a derivative of SGML) is being used to create
thousands of mark-up languages, including those designed for publishing such as
DITA, DocBook, MathML, RSS, ePUB, ODF, SVG, XHTML, and even Microsoft Office's
Office Open format.
Any XML language can be edited in a generic XML editor, because XML is a
standard. Likewise, any XML document can be displayed in most Web browsers,
because Web browsers are XML-aware. Most programming tools can work with XML
files, regardless of their type, because XML is a standard. Most Web servers
can work with XML files for the same reason. XML documents of one type can be
easily converted to another XML format using the XML Stylesheet Language (XSL),
because everything is standard.
The fact that LaTeX hasn't changed for 30 years is one of its shortcomings. It
pre-dates XML, and therefore can't take advantage of the standardised nature of
XML documents. This is not to say that LaTeX is not a good typesetting system.
It can be effectively used in XML authoring environments as an intermediate
format during the automated publishing process. (XML gets automatically
processed to LaTeX which is then automatically processed to PDF.)
Hope this helps explain what I meant.
Tony Self
>>> James Hunt 28/04/11 9:49 PM >>>
A recent contributor to this list asserted in passing that "LaTeX uses
non-standard markup", but LaTeX users would find this statement baffling. LaTeX
has been the standard in various scientific, engineering and technical
communications fields since 1985; the underlying TeX typesetter has not changed
significantly since 1978; LaTeX is used by possibly millions of authors; and
there are organisations (TeX Users Group; American Mathematical Society) that
control structure and development. To me, that looks like a very
well-established standard.
So - non-standard in comparison to what?
JH**************************************************
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