Re: LOUT and XML

[Michael Piotrowski]

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

>> 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.
> 
> This sounds like the way to go to me.
> Get the conversion scripts for both directions writen, give the new
> format a name: <lout>, loutXML? publicise it and accept questions to
> the list in both formats, and lout can be the number one XML formating
> system in no time.
> Any of us could do it, but you need one accepted and blessed version
> to give it the neccessary intertia to be unstopable.

Well, being first would give your implementation a good chance of
getting accepted, especially if people really have been waiting for
this so urgently, as you seem to suggest.

Personally, while I admit that it might be convenient in some cases, I
still think the "real" problems of both XML formatting and Lout are
somewhere else.  I could also imagine that, once you have Lout using
XML syntax, people are going to demand that it supports XSL-FO,
because otherwise it would be useless.  And of course it should
support every other hip, unfinished W3C Recommendation du jour, too.

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