"Adrian F. Clark" alien@essex.ac.uk writes:
What XML does is allow the database developer to define the _content_ of what will eventually become a web page using application-oriented tags and without having to worry about the page's appearance.
In *theory*, you don't worry about appearance for most of the time in LaTeX. As with HTML, reality bites.
[...] In principle (though I've never seen it done) XML could produce LaTeX so that we could get typeset output that looks better than what spews out of Netscape, which is definitely of the same kind of abysmal quality as Word.
Well, you can look at this two ways: firstly, there are LaTeX ways to produce XML and manipulate XML (I think it's xmltex, but that might be wrong); secondly, XML can be rendered to FOP and then to PDFs which aren't bad at all, especially combined with SVG.
However, it all smacks of reinventing wheels again, doesn't it?
The advantage XML over (say) keyword-value pairs is that XML allows the developer to build up a tree-like structure that can be parsed and processed by a standard piece of software.
Indeed, but S-expressions (lispish ones to the rest of you) never really caught on, did they? Once again, the lispers got it right 40 years before everyone else, but have nothing to show for it but the knowledge that they were right 40 years before...
Anyway, Neill is using lyx, not pukka LaTeX -- urghhhh!
Eeek, using a non-free library to boot! Burn him at the viva! ;-)