On Wed, 22 Jun 2011, Keith J. Schultz wrote: > 2) A program can open any/retrieve any file on a server > using http. all it needs to do is speak http!
While we're at it, let's add a spelling checker, SQL database backend, and multilingual thesaurus to TeX. Also a Space Invaders mini-game that you can play while you wait for your document to compile. And let's make all these things work identically on all platforms, of course. I don't think that network communication is reasonably part of what TeX is for, and although I recognize that some current extended-TeX projects already include it because it was part of languages or libraries they imported, and there may be some EXTREMELY UNUSUAL situations (such as compiling documents locally on a small tablet) where remote file loading is useful, I hope there isn't a large effort made to add this as a basic widely-used feature. I already have enough trouble when people send me documents with files missing, without also adding in the compatibility and security nightmares of "Oh, my document won't compile, or won't compile the same way today as yesterday, because of issues on a remote server I don't control." Remember that repeatability is a basic part of the mission of TeX, and repeatability simply no longer exists as soon as your document depends on remote files. The existing \write18 feature allows documents to execute arbitrary programs, and there's free software available for all currently popular operating systems to automatically download files as needed. (e.g. HTTP-client filesystems for FUSE, under Linux and Mac OS.) So people who do need to make their documents access the network during compilation, already can. I don't think it should be encouraged, though, nor that TeX should have an entire HTTP client built into it (which is NOT a trivial project if you want it to be cross-platform and actually work) just to make it easier for users to destroy the repeatability of TeX compilation. -- Matthew Skala msk...@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca People before principles. http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/ -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
