On piątek 30 sierpień 2002 08:24 am, Andre Poenitz wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 30, 2002 at 02:16:48PM +0200, Lars Gullik Bjønnes wrote:
> > | I agree. Lars, it's just *naming*. You don't need to read a latex
> > | conspiracy into it.
> >
> > but I do...
>
> We know.
I think that this was discussed almost a year ago on this list, and that the
consensus was (with Lars tricking everybody into consensus ;-))) that LyX
format should have its own, consistent naming. So that if most names are
spelled out like fooBar (say), then it's a bad thing to spell some like fb.
I think, that from the issue of a person who was doing quite some lyx file
editing by hand, that makes sense. I used a 486 laptop where I didn't have
xwindows installed yet, and I edited my thesis lyx files with joe.
There are two things worth mentioning:
1. XML, although a nicety, is almost useless for people who edit things in it.
It pushes one to type so many unnecessary keystrokes for even the most
trivial things, and eveything has to be typed twice (once for opening tag,
once for closing tag). TeX-like LyX syntax is much more concise and thus very
fast to type when you edit things by hand. It also disrupts the visual text
flow in the .lyx file much less.
2. If we use things like fb instead of fooBar, which are spelled out
differently than most other keyboards, it can be acceptable if somebody
documents lyx file format and keeps the documentation up-to-date.
I've made a very simple recoder for myself so that I can do html file editing
in a more concise way. That's the extent that I detest XML's verbosiness, and
that's what my recoder does:
\foo[id=1, name=bleh]{abcd efgh}
becomes
<foo id="1" name="bleh>abcd efgh</foo>
\foo[id=1]\bar{def}
becomes
<foo id="1" \><bar>def<\bar>
It's trivial to see which one takes less typing. I wish html's structure was
expresed in TeX way, rather that XML-way. Save the wishes I said to myself
one fine day, and now my html (before recoding) documents are much shorter.
I've also made certain tags behave the up-to-the-end-of-enclosing-brace way,
so that if I type
{foo foo \em bar bar}
i get
foo foo <em>bar bar</em>
I think Knuth did a good job with TeX syntax ;-). Take this as my voice in the
discussion, I'm in no position to push the fine lyx developers around with my
sometimes crazy ideas ;-)
Cheers, Kuba Ober
