Re: [Groff] more html macros needed

[Ted Harding]

On 02-Jan-02 Jon Snader wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 01, 2002 at 09:07:51AM +0100, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
>> I fully agree -- in my opinion, we have to experiment a lot with www
>> macros, rewriting them in a systematical way later.  In general,
>> providing macros of the form .xxx and .xxx-end similar to LaTeX's
>> \begin{xxx} ... \end{xxx} is probably good for groff also.
> 
> Let me offer a dissenting opinion.  To my mind, and to that of many
> others, one of the chief advantages of [gt]roff over TeX and LaTeX is
> that it is much less wordy.

I have to say that I strongly assent to the above "dissenting opinion".
It has been one of the main reasons why I never had the stomach
to get deeply involved with using TeX!

> I don't believe that we should be trying
> to emulate the LaTeX syntax.  Rather we should try, when possible, to
> follow the original paradigm of having a request remain active until
> the next paragraph (e.g. until the next, possibly implicit, .RT in the
> ms macros).

Here, however, my assent is qualified. I think this is
very much a question of "horses for courses". The .RT macro
in "ms", for instance, resets the "paragraph environment"
to its initial state. Certain things revert, when they are
defined in this "environment". Other things do not. This
is entirely appropriate, in my opinion.

As an example of the contrary, I have an elaborate macro
for switching to Cyrillic output, which imposes a global
Cyrillic font and also defines several ".char"s to allow
text entry according to a transliteration scheme. This
persists across paragraphs, page breaks, and all. The name
of this macro is

  .cyrillic

When I come to the end of what I want in Cyrillic, I have
a macro which undoes everything done by .cyrillic, and
reinstates the state which was in force previously. The
name of this macro is

  ./cyrillic

(Name conventions clearly inspired by HTML!). To sum up,
where there is an argument in favour of having certain
changes only lasting as long as the current paragraph,
then by all means let them be implicitly reset when
a new paragraph begins. In other cases, let the reset
be entirely under the user's explicit control. I am
quite strongly against having the software making too
many assumptions about what the user wants or needs!

Best wishes to all, and Happy New Year!
Ted.

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Date: 02-Jan-02                                       Time: 13:45:40
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