Re: LOUT and XML

[Michael Piotrowski]

Ian Carr-de Avelon <address@hidden> writes:

> Michael Piotrowski <address@hidden> wrote:
>>You wouldn't gain anything if Lout used XML syntax.  A Lout document
>>is a program--to translate it to something else, you have to execute
>>it.  Using angle brackets doesn't magically turn it into descriptive
>>markup.

> To say you would not gain anything is a slight exaguration. If all the
> files you deal with in the process have the same basic syntax, then 
> it is a lot easier to read and move between stages in the data/document
> processing chain.

It is certainly true that having a common syntax may, for various
reasons, be a good thing.  However, my impression is that many people
asking for Lout to use XML syntax expect it to somehow become
descriptive, so that you can, for example, (sensibly) convert Lout to
DocBook.  That's what I tried to address with my comment.

> How many of us would start looking at the postscript or pdf output
> if things start going wrong? it is only a different language, so
> according to your argumant we should not think twice.

I don't understand your point here, sorry.  What are you trying to
say?

> I can understand that Jeff is not about to change, but some simple
> transliterator which changes <X>this</X> into @X {this} for all
> values of X, or back again, may enable a big change in the userbase.
>
> Obviously <X> and/or @X still needs to be defined. Which is your
> point. But; What you perhapse miss is how many people are looking
> towards spending the whole of their working week in XML angle
> bracket land and the levels of abstraction they are involved in. In
> traditional Lout and TeX work you define that part of the text is a
> heading in one place and define what a heading is in another
> place. With docbook you are doing more or less the same, but most
> interest in XML is based on industry standards for product and
> transaction encoding in XML.

[...]

I can't really see how Lout with angle brackets will help here, except
maybe for visual consistency.  The hard part of the conversion from
descriptive markup to layout is certainly not that your layout
description uses curly brackets; it's that you have to _define_ that
conversion, and you have to define your desired layout.

I might be wrong, of course.  If Lout with angle brackets is really
needed, one could easily write a very short Perl script that does
something like

   s/<([-_.:[:alpha:]])+>/@\1{/g;
   s/</.+>/}/g;

to demonstrate the value of the approach.  If this proves to be
popular, it then wouldn't be to hard to take Lout (rembember, it's
under the GPL), and change its syntax.

-- 
Michael Piotrowski, M.A.                                  <address@hidden>