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Re: [Groff] XML and groff as frontend


From: Alejandro López-Valencia
Subject: Re: [Groff] XML and groff as frontend
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2005 16:44:12 -0500

On 10/22/05, Zvezdan Petkovic wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 22, 2005 at 03:47:19PM -0400, Larry Kollar wrote:
> > I use structured FrameMaker at work to write documentation, and one of
> > the easier ways I've found to get text into it is to paste it into
> > Vim then pipe lines through scripts that wrap blocks of text in tags
> > (lists,  sections, and so forth). I then import that into Frame. It
> > works very well,  although the technique is probably specific to the
> > writer and the work involved.
>
> That's also a nice example of how painful is writing in XML.
> You use a totally different tool (Vim) to help another tool that's
> supposedly made to help you with XML (FrameMaker).

XML was never intended as an input language for human use but as a
*human readable* machine-level data representation. On the other hand,
troff, TeX and the macro packages built upon them are low/middle level
languages that a human is expected to write and understand.

I find the present day fascination with HTML/XML as another
manifestation of the proverbial "he who only knows to use a hammer,
thinks that every problem is a nail". A good dose of SGML hand-coding
should sober up anyone any day.

--
Alejandro López-Valencia




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