Re: advocating XML

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@home.com>]

Alexey Gokhberg wrote -

> I am quite fluent in XSLT, but even the partial implementation of that
> stylesheet took a reasonable time. I stopped it, when I calculated, how
> much time will it take to complete the job. The part of stylesheet that
> I managed to complete looks terrible in comparison with the templates
> used by the original Python script.
>
> Furthermore, the source interface representation in Python (using Python
> lists) is more compact and more readable than the equivalent
> representation in XML.
>

Yes, it's not for everything, that's for sure.

>
> How to apply XML-enabling technologies to the raw text source data? Yes,
> with regular expressions it is possible to analyse the raw text,
> converting it to XML. Then XSLT processing, then FO formatting, than
> obtaining the PostScript output (PostScript is must for the production
> printing). But why do we need XML at all? Why not to generate TeX
> directly using just regular expressions?
>
 Or create Postscript output directly, for that matter.  I've done that too.

Cheers,

Tom Passin