I'm not competent at TeX -- haven't even seen TeX source
files for years. I refer to troff source coded without
macros as "in-line" coding (normal text \f3bold text\f1 normal
text) where fonts are defined in a macro file or at the start
of the document.
For HTML and other SGML-like markups, the markup reveals the
structure of the text being modified, hence <h1>text</h1> is a
heading, <emphasis>text</emphasis> changes to the emphasis font
(italic in this case), or <strong>text</strong> for bold, but
what actually happens is defined by the Document Type Definition
(DTD). HTML is a DTD operating under SGML (Standard Generalized
Markup Language), which is an industry/government standard.
I tend to avoid the term "structural markup language" because it
can be confusing due to variations in how different people use it
when writing about typesetting and text formatting.
Macros come closer to "structural", but really aren't. They're
more a shorthand method to save typing, and give control over the
end result by allowing programming a macro file -- thus allowing
different processing for different output devices, for example, or
being able to instantly change an entire document with a few changes
in the file instead of throughout a document.
I always use macros to some degree, even in a one-page document for
simplification of typing. I don't use the usual MS, ME, and other
macro files because they don't fit my needs.
I also hand-program XHTML and CSS for website work instead of using
content-management systems like Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress.
Clarke
On 05/03/2012 09:21 AM, Anton Shepelev wrote:
I accidently came upon what seems to me an unfair
judgement about groff and TeX:
As an example: In a presentation-markup lan-
guage, if you want to emphasize a word, you
might instruct the formatter to set it in
boldface. In troff(1) this would look like
so:
All your base
.B are
belong to us!
In a structural-markup language, you would
tell the formatter to emphasize the word:
All your base<emphasis>are</emphasis> belong to us!
The "<emphasis>" and</emphasis>in the line
above are called markup tags, or just tags
for short. They are the instructions to your
formatter.
In a structural-markup language, the physi-
cal appearance of the final document would
be controlled by a stylesheet . It is the
stylesheet that would tell the formatter
"render emphasis as a font change to bold-
face". One advantage of structural-markup
languages is that by changing a stylesheet
you can globally change the presentation of
the document (to use different fonts, for
example) without having to hack all the the
individual instances of (say) .B in the doc-
ument itself.
Source:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/DocBook-Demystification-HOWTO/x69.html
Should we, maybe, ask the author to correct it, for
I think, groff and TeX macro packages do provide a
means for structural mark-up, and, considering the
example above, it is of course possible to redefine
the macro .B to achieve the desired result? For
clarity, it could also be renamed as "EMPH".
In my understanding, a package provides both con-
structs for structural mark-up and means to modify
their underlying "presentation", and the one is very
loosely coupled with the other, allowing to change
"presentation" without affecting the "structure" and
vice versa...
Anton
