On Tue, Jul 24, 2001 at 06:36:00PM -0700, Eric wrote:
> Pete, in the long run, I think it would be wise to
> learn xml, as i think it will largely supersede HTML
> and all other doc types (MS Word, LaTex, etc.) or will
> at least be able to do as much as, if not more, than
> any one of these other methods. I think it is going to
> be the universal. This is an investment that will pay
> off. ; )
> Eric
I think XML is a truly excellent format, since it provides a way to
describe in human-readable format pretty much anything at all. It
does, however, have the distinct disadvantage of a colossal waste of
disk-space compared to binary formats, or even other more compact text
formats. Having a single standard format though helps a lot with
interapplication communication.
I don't think it'll really replace LaTeX or Word, though - it doesn't
have to! You can simply translate from XML to LaTeX or Word (or
PowerPoint, even), as you see fit. It's the generic source form that
can be produced to any number of targets. Though its true when more
engines are produced to directly display XSL FOTs, such conversions
may become obsolete. (Hm... did I just contradict myself? Oh,
well...)
As I said before, though; I'm not really using SGML at the moment,
since none of the tools I have found to fit my needs process the XML
quite correctly; though there are free Java and Python XSLT processors
available that I haven't really checked out. When XML tools are more
widely available, I'll probably write a Perl script to translate the
SGML to XML. I already do confine myself to case-sensitive
constructs, so all that'll really entail is determining which tags are
empty elements, and adding a '/' before the '>'.
Micah
