From: Pierre-Charles David <Pierre-Charles.David@...>
Date: 2001-10-22T20:35:10+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:22955] Re: [ANN] texml.rb 0.3

Stefan Scholl wrote:

> On 2001-10-19 13:31:41Z, Pierre-Charles David <Pierre-Charles.David@emn.fr> wrote:
> 
>>For example, the (La)TeX source fragment \texttt{some text} can be 
>>represented in TeXML as <cmd name="texttt">some text</cmd>. The DTD for 
>>
> This seems to be pretty useless.


No it's not. :-)

>         <tt>sometext</tt>
> 
> is easier and would be more XML like. Representing different
> LaTeX commands with one element and different values for an
> attribute looks like the work of a XML beginner.


I don't think you understood the purpose of TeXML (probably because of 
my explanations). TeXML is NOT designed to be coded by hand. It is 
generally the result of an XSLT stylesheet. As an author, you write 
<tt>sometext</tt>, and your stylesheet outputs the TeXML equivalent, 
which is then transformed into LaTeX source to be typeset. The goal is 
to be able to leverage the power of LaTeX, both the typesetting engine 
and the numerous extensions. It would not be possible to define an XML 
DTD for TeXML using your approach (<tt>sometext</tt>) because the set of 
possible LaTeX commands is not known (or even bound). Of course, a DTD 
is not always necessary, and well-formedness is often enough, but not 
here: how would you know given '<foo>stg</foo>' if foo is supposed to be 
a LaTeX command (translated as \foo{stg}) or an environment 
(\begin{doo}stg\end{foo}) for example?

BTW, I did not designed TeXML. Douglas Lovell did, and I don't think he 
can be considered an XML beginner 
(http://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc19/b083.html).

-- 
Pierre-Charles David (pcdavid <at> emn <dot> fr)
Computer Science PhD Student, �cole des Mines de Nantes, France
Homepage: http://purl.org/net/home/pcdavid