On Fri, 4 May 2001, Neill Newman wrote:
on a content/markup note.... If anybody needs any help with Latex, let me know, I'm now finishing off my Phd thesis, and believe me, Latex is definatly worth learning.....
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. That's why we have MathML, SyncML, VoiceXML and all these other not-quite-agreed markups for particular applications. 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.
This separation of content and appearance is precisely what Tim BL (name-dropping) was actually trying to do with HTML before Netscape jumped in and started adding appearance-related tags: the page defined content, the browser appearance. Oh, how I wish we could go back to those days so that I didn't now have to read pages filled with miniscule Arial text!
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.
Anyway, Neill is using lyx, not pukka LaTeX -- urghhhh!
..Adrian (Neill's PhD supervisor and a LaTeX hacker ;-)