Re: HTML+

   Are you saying that a TeX widget could be developed from the current
   TeX source code?  As I understand it, this would not be too easy, but
   not _that_ hard either, as long one does not try to implement it as an
   editable widget.

No.  I'm saying that something can be ginned up to produce hypertext
documents from dvi files (with appropriate \special's).  That would
keep the TeX/LaTeX community happy until something better could be
done.

Here's the point, in case I haven't been sufficiently clear.
Currently, TeX/LaTeX is the lingua franca for scientific document
exchange in the academic world.  I want to prevent this community from
fragmenting into a babel of incompatible systems, reducing everyone to
having to communicate with Postscript images or worse.  This requires
providing the community with enough features to keep them happy.
LaTeX-2e should prevent fragmentation due to incompatible methods of
including graphics.  The current challenge is to keep the community
from fragmenting because of the inability to produce Web-able
hypertext.

It will be very difficult to create a new standard if the current one
is abandoned and everyone adopts different systems.  (Several
centuries passed between the demise of Latin and the rise of English
as the Lingua Franca of science.)

Leslie Lamport

Received on Friday, 16 September 1994 01:28:03 UTC