On 27/04/2015 07:35, Philip Taylor wrote: > Going even further off-topic, but pursuing this one aspect of the > thread, is there not only real one problem : the need to educate users > to cease marking up their documents in raw (La)TeX syntax, and instead > to express them in well-formed XML ? I have just finished typesetting > (using [plain] XeTeX) a 544pp book marked up entirely in XML, and whilst > I have made no efforts to generate PDF/UA, I am convinced that the task > of so doing (assuming that the necessary primitives are or were > available in XeTeX) would have been 1/1000 of the effort needed to do so > had the book been marked up in traditional (La)TeX syntax with its usual > accompanying conflation of form and content.
As Ross says in a parallel message, XML raises different issues and is not a panacea. For a start, we can ask if XML is a particularly good format not only here or for anything (there's a blog post by Linus Torvalds suggesting the answer is 'no'!). Assuming XML is at some level a good plan, that still doesn't make it a good plan for the end user nor ensure that the end sure will stick to logical structures. There's also the business that TeX is useful because sometimes we do need some visual adjustment or programming element. LaTeX2e is already not bad for structure if used in the right way, and ConTeXt MkIV has gone further along an XML-like road without using this as the native syntax (\startsection/\stopsection for example), and of course plain users can define similar structures (indeed without the constraints that LaTeX has of needing not to break things). -- Joseph Wright -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex