You use a totally different tool (Vim) to help another tool that's supposedly made to help you with XML (FrameMaker).
Yes, but in this case I'm using vim (or rather, piping blocks of text into shell scripts from vim) to throw down the essential markup: I can do something like "8!!mks" to: wrap 8 lines of text in <section></section>, wrap the first line in <label></label>, and wrap the other lines in <p></p>. Dealing with character- level markup isn't nearly as automatic, although Vim's XML plugin makes it no more difficult than doing the job in Frame.
XML was never intended as an input language for human use but as a *human readable* machine-level data representation. On the other hand, troff, TeX and the macro packages built upon them are low/middle level languages that a human is expected to write and understand. I find the present day fascination with HTML/XML as another manifestation of the proverbial "he who only knows to use a hammer, thinks that every problem is a nail". A good dose of SGML hand-coding should sober up anyone any day.
As I understand it, XML is simply SGML minus tag minimization plus Unicode. The first SGML spec was released around 1980, and the tag minimization features were there to make it easier to hand-code. I saw an example that looked like this: <sect> Frobnicating the Widget <p>Blah chatter wibble... The DTD, in this case, was designed so that the first element inside <sect> is <head>, which is followed by <p> (and other elements). Knowing this, the SGML parser could infer that anything between the <sect> and <p> tags is a <head> element and therefore didn't have to be marked as such. Other shortcuts included </> to close the last open tag. Ideally, people using XML won't have to work directly with markup... thus, tag minimization wasn't considered important. But I agree with Alejandro that *roff is a nearly ideal markup language for hand-coding (I consider *TeX to be too verbose as well). The short commands don't get in your way and let you add markup while you're typing with little or no distraction. -- Larry Kollar k o l l a r @ a l l t e l . n e t Unix Text Processing: "UTP Revival" http://home.alltel.net/kollar/utp/ _______________________________________________ Groff mailing list Groff@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff
