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Re: [Groff] Eric Raymond on groff and TeX
From: |
Dorai Sitaram |
Subject: |
Re: [Groff] Eric Raymond on groff and TeX |
Date: |
Thu, 3 May 2012 08:51:29 -0700 (PDT) |
I think esr is emphasizing (!) that in a structural-markup language the tags
can have no typographic meaning whatsoever.
While it may be possible to mimic the tags of structural markup in a
presentation-markup language, there is power in completely and firmly
separating the two aspects: you can then independently develop the two aspects;
indeed the typographic aspect can come to embrace completely new and even
unexpected media whereas the structural aspect remains the same.
If you tie yourself to a presentation-markup language, there is no guarantee
that a user has not made use of the presentation-markup language in such a way
that it is impossible to migrate cleanly to a different structural markup or
presentation. Indeed, it has been the norm for users to reach for low-level
commands while using high-level packages in groff or (La)TeX. Neither system
prevents the user in any way from being "non-structural".
--d
>________________________________
>From: Anton Shepelev <address@hidden>
>To: address@hidden
>Sent: Thursday, May 3, 2012 11:21 AM
>Subject: [Groff] Eric Raymond on groff and TeX
>
>I accidently came upon what seems to me an unfair
>judgement about groff and TeX:
>
> As an example: In a presentation-markup lan-
> guage, if you want to emphasize a word, you
> might instruct the formatter to set it in
> boldface. In troff(1) this would look like
> so:
>
> All your base
> .B are
> belong to us!
>
> In a structural-markup language, you would
> tell the formatter to emphasize the word:
>
> All your base <emphasis>are</emphasis> belong to us!
>
> The "<emphasis>" and </emphasis>in the line
> above are called markup tags, or just tags
> for short. They are the instructions to your
> formatter.
>
> In a structural-markup language, the physi-
> cal appearance of the final document would
> be controlled by a stylesheet . It is the
> stylesheet that would tell the formatter
> "render emphasis as a font change to bold-
> face". One advantage of structural-markup
> languages is that by changing a stylesheet
> you can globally change the presentation of
> the document (to use different fonts, for
> example) without having to hack all the the
> individual instances of (say) .B in the doc-
> ument itself.
>
>Source:
>
> http://tldp.org/HOWTO/DocBook-Demystification-HOWTO/x69.html
>
>Should we, maybe, ask the author to correct it, for
>I think, groff and TeX macro packages do provide a
>means for structural mark-up, and, considering the
>example above, it is of course possible to redefine
>the macro .B to achieve the desired result? For
>clarity, it could also be renamed as "EMPH".
>
>In my understanding, a package provides both con-
>structs for structural mark-up and means to modify
>their underlying "presentation", and the one is very
>loosely coupled with the other, allowing to change
>"presentation" without affecting the "structure" and
>vice versa...
>
>Anton
>
>
>
>
- [Groff] Eric Raymond on groff and TeX, Anton Shepelev, 2012/05/03
- Re: [Groff] Eric Raymond on groff and TeX, Eric S. Raymond, 2012/05/03
- Re: [Groff] Eric Raymond on groff and TeX, Meg McRoberts, 2012/05/03
- Re: [Groff] Eric Raymond on groff and TeX, Clarke Echols, 2012/05/03
- Re: [Groff] Eric Raymond on groff and TeX, Meg McRoberts, 2012/05/03
- Re: [Groff] Eric Raymond on groff and TeX, Clarke Echols, 2012/05/03