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Re: QuotedDisplay in DocumentLayout Use clause
From: |
Franck Arnaud |
Subject: |
Re: QuotedDisplay in DocumentLayout Use clause |
Date: |
Sun, 19 Jul 98 10:53:31 GMT |
Quite a while ago, Valeriy E. Ushakov wrote:
> IMHO, `dl' has grown too large. It contains fundamental things like
> low level page layout and support for generic large scale structures
> along with things that logically belongs to a logically higher level -
> like displays, lists, figures and the like.
>
> May be it's time to consider splitting dl? In particular, I thought
> about the core stuff like pages and structural elements. As Lout
> becomes (I dare to hope) popular as a target of SGML formatting,
> separating this stuff will help developers - for they will be able to
> reuse the core but add bells and whistles that suits there backends.
> OTOH, where it's a burden for a user to put extra braces and invoke
> extra symbols
But is it really worth the extra pain? I find Lout's syntax often very
cumbersome and antilogical. I would much prefer to have
@List {
@Item {First}
@Item {Second}
}
than the nonsense about @List/@EndList and the horrible @BeginXXXs in sections
and the "don't ask" // at the start of documents etc. Everything could be
dealt with a clean syntax it seems to me. Maybe the more controversial thing
would be paragraphs but I'm the kind of extremist who always ends their HTML
paragraphs with the (optional) </p>, even when writing raw HTML with a dumb
editor.
Wouldn't a more consistently functional syntax allow us to get rid of macros
who seem a source of great confusion and arcane error messages? At least if dl
is split, maybe it could be macro-free and macros used only in upper-level
packages (and disabled from the command line?).
> - a backend that targets Lout does not care - so I anticipate that SGML
> transformations will target their own Lout > packages, tightly coupled with
> the backend.
Another thing that could be interesting (but probably not realistic) is for
Lout to use XML syntax directly:
{Times} @Font {Text} ==> <font typeface="times">Text</font>
That would allow the many many people familiar with XML syntax to learn Lout
more easily, and to use XML>XML transformers to produce Lout.
--
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