On Tue, May 08, 2012, Larry Kollar wrote: > But I think there's room for a third kind of markup. I > call it *humanist* markup. Humanist markup has structure — > headings, lists, paragraphs, are easy to denote and > separated from presentation. The markup is simple to > transform to other languages. But in the end, the human can > step in and override things when necessary, because in > the end the humans know what they want. Macro packages > can provide that kind of flexibility, where BDSM markup > languages won't.
I'm in Larry's camp on this. I wouldn't want to typeset a book of contemporary poetry using structural markup, but neither would I want to prepare a technical report with only presentational markup (perish the thought). Perhaps my bias is showing, but it seems to me that all the major groff macrosets provide an acceptable--sometimes exemplary--middle ground. Humanist is entirely the right word for it. Larry's correct, too, about transforming groff markup to other languages. As Steve can attest, I think, it's generally simpler to convert groff markup into acceptable XML than to produce good pdfs from XML filtered through groff. Looking forward to more on that, Steve. -- Peter Schaffter Author of The Binbrook Caucus http://www.schaffter.ca
