"Adrian F. Clark" <alien(a)essex.ac.uk> writes:
> What XML does is allow the database developer to define the _content_
> of what will eventually become a web page using application-oriented
> tags and without having to worry about the page's appearance.
In *theory*, you don't worry about appearance for most of the time in
LaTeX. As with HTML, reality bites.
> [...] In principle (though I've never seen it done) XML could
> produce LaTeX so that we could get typeset output that looks better
> than what spews out of Netscape, which is definitely of the same
> kind of abysmal quality as Word.
Well, you can look at this two ways: firstly, there are LaTeX ways to
produce XML and manipulate XML (I think it's xmltex, but that might be
wrong); secondly, XML can be rendered to FOP and then to PDFs which
aren't bad at all, especially combined with SVG.
However, it all smacks of reinventing wheels again, doesn't it?
> The advantage XML over (say) keyword-value pairs is that XML allows
> the developer to build up a tree-like structure that can be parsed and
> processed by a standard piece of software.
Indeed, but S-expressions (lispish ones to the rest of you) never
really caught on, did they? Once again, the lispers got it right 40
years before everyone else, but have nothing to show for it but the
knowledge that they were right 40 years before...
> Anyway, Neill is using lyx, not pukka LaTeX -- urghhhh!
Eeek, using a non-free library to boot! Burn him at the viva! ;-)
--
MJR