- From: <lamport@src.dec.com>
- Date: Thu, 15 Sep 94 16:20:48 -0700
- To: torgeir@ii.uib.no
- Cc: www-html@www0.cern.ch
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