Re: HTML+

I do not doubt that LaTeX can be regarded as a document structuring
language, but I do doubt that users will be happy with a typesetting
system built on TeX.

What I expect from a WWW browser is, that paragraphs are formatted
according to my personal preferences of font, color and window size.
Therefore the _viewer_ must be able to re-format paragraphs on the fly,
and this is a point at which TeX is very bad suited.

Therefore, if I now adopt a system built on top of TeX with pre-formatting,
one day our mind will change and we will want to have on-line reformatting.
And this functionality will put us at the same stage in development, where
we are today -- only a few years later.

Therefore I think we should adopt TeX's strength (typesetting of
formulas and tables), but leave out its weakness (static formatiing intended
to be printed out on fixed-format paper).


Thomas Netousek
tkn@vnet.ibm.com.

Received on Thursday, 15 September 1994 18:47:33 UTC