Re: Generating high-level formatting output

["Sebastian Rahtz" <sebastian.rahtz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Adam Di Carlo writes:
 > 
 > Personally, I think it would be wiser to go from SGML -> TeX, and skip
 > LaTeX altogther.  That's because LaTeX has it's own ideas on how to
 > format stuff, whereas with the low-level TeX you'd have more control
 > and more robustness (fewer TeX infrastructure slings-and-arrows, such
 > as Babel breaking everything).
 > 
the corollary to that is that if you don't have LaTeX's 
 Babel
 font selection scheme
 multicol, tabular packages
 backend-indepepdent graphics and color
 hypertext
you have to invent it all for yourself.

attracted as I am to Norman Gray's high-level LaTeX backend, I think
its use would spell the death of DSSSL, whose only strength[1] is thea
device-independent FOs. using it as a transformation language just
makes it an `also-ran' alongside a myriad other languages. Most
telling, to my mind, is James Clark's statement (I hope I read it
right) that he thinks XSLT took all the lessons learnt from the
transformation parts of Jade and did it even better. Given this, why
would we not right write a "*ML to LaTeX" converter in XSL?

I just hate the idea of DSSSL living on solely in the person of Jade
running Docbook transformations for Linux documentors. Lets not give
up on FOs, please!

Sebastian

[1] apart from the fact that Jade groks full SGML, unlike eg xt


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