Am 03.10.2010 12:43, schrieb Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd):
Philipp Stephani wrote:
Yes, but is that really "structure"? Of course it's basically a
question of definition, but if you look at other technologies that are
supposed to be able to express structure (e.g. XML), then you'll find
data modeling, schema, transformation and querying languages, all of
which are nonexistent in the TeX world. What I want to say is that
macros can give a pretty good *simulation* of structure, but that
simulation is leaky. In the middle of a LaTeX document you can say
\let\chapter\section
and all subsequent sections turn into chapters. This lack of
referential transparency makes LaTeX documents pretty complex and hard
to process compared to XML languages.
Agreed. Because TeX is not only a declarative language but also
a procedural language, one can abuse it to change the semantics
of one's markup mid-stream. That one should not so do is by
the by : one can. However, TeX purists such as myself prefer
to keep the declarative and procedural aspects entirely separate,
whence the fact that my own documents are frequently marked up
using a totally different syntax to Don's backslash and braces :
I prefer an SGML/HTML/XML-like syntax that I have described elsewhere
as "ATML" or "XTML" ({A|eXtensible} TeX Markup Language).
In giving the world TeX, Don gave us a loaded gun; it is
up to us to use it wisely.
** Phil.
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Agreed as well, but that's another question of style, which is important
in structured thinking:
If I want the document to have a uniform layout of its structural
elements (such that every reader can extract the structure easily from
the document), I shouldn't redefine the structural elements in the
middle of the document.
I write the content, I structure the content by \chapter, \section,
etc., I redefine what these macros do in the preamble.
I don't know enough about xml and the other concepts you named as part
of structure, but these LaTeX-Macros _are_ structural elements. Even a
simple full stop "." in text is a structural element, although it works
at another level.
bye Toscho
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