Let me go on a bit of a rampage about TeX for a bit. TeX is not a markup format. It is an executable code format. It is a programming language by design! (It's a very poor programming language, but let's ignore that for the moment.) You run a TeX program to generate the rendered output. This has some major implications: -- It's very hard to write a universal WYSIWYG editor. While I was still in research I tried various WYSIWYG TeX editors. They all sucked because it's an intractable problem. That's not a problem for programmers, mathematicians and scientists who are used to writing everything in plaintext with emacs. It is for everyone else. -- You have an edit/compile/debug cycle and your Tex can fail with compilation/runtime errors. "Catastrophic fail" document content models (like XML) really suck for Web content. (Yes, MathML is XML, but people can and should use the HTML embedding which avoids this problem.)
(Because I like WYSIWYG and I don't like edit/compile/debug cycles and TeX is atrocious as a language, I tried to avoid it in my research. I published a POPL paper full of type theory written in Mircrosoft Word (which is totally unheard of), and wrote my thesis which also include a lot of semantics and type theory in FrameMaker, which was actually pretty good but is very dead. (I had an officemate who wrote his thesis in Scribe, which was very dead even in the mid-90s!)) You could try to fix TeX's problems in a new math language, but computer scientists have been talking about that for decades and nobody has. Of course, computer scientists and mathematicians would probably continue to prefer a Turing-complete language, which is fine for them but again, not suitable for normal users for the above reasons. And of course, to the extent you change TeX, you break compatibility with TeX, which is much of its appeal in the first place. Rob -- q“qIqfq qyqoquq qlqoqvqeq qtqhqoqsqeq qwqhqoq qlqoqvqeq qyqoquq,q qwqhqaqtq qcqrqeqdqiqtq qiqsq qtqhqaqtq qtqoq qyqoquq?q qEqvqeqnq qsqiqnqnqeqrqsq qlqoqvqeq qtqhqoqsqeq qwqhqoq qlqoqvqeq qtqhqeqmq.q qAqnqdq qiqfq qyqoquq qdqoq qgqoqoqdq qtqoq qtqhqoqsqeq qwqhqoq qaqrqeq qgqoqoqdq qtqoq qyqoquq,q qwqhqaqtq qcqrqeqdqiqtq qiqsq qtqhqaqtq qtqoq qyqoquq?q qEqvqeqnq qsqiqnqnqeqrqsq qdqoq qtqhqaqtq.q" _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
