SGML and Lout

[Jeff Kingston]

Although I basically agree with rodrigo, I think it's worth
pointing out that in pronciple Lout can do a similar job to
HTML.  You could define one Lout symbol corresponding to
each HTML symbol, and not tell anyone what the symbol actually
prints out, and then the result would be HTML with a different
lexical structure only.  I admit there might be some practical
hurdles, like locally visible symbols.

The advantage of this is that by supplying bodies for the
symbols you get an interpreter which really prints something.

My complaint about SGML is that I think describing the structure
is the easy bit, and so from my point of view SGML has very
little content.  With the scheme I've outlined you get the logical
structure but you get document formatting as well.

Anyway, if you follow this through it leads to a need for Lout
to HTML and HTML to Lout converters, which would be fairly
trivial once you've defined the Lout symbols that are to
correspond with the HTML ones.

Lout Version 3 is getting very close.

Jeff Kingston