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List:       lyx-devel
Subject:    Re: Progress on the MS Word to LyX conversion (xml)
From:       Abdelrazak Younes <younes () lyx ! org>
Date:       2008-07-24 9:50:27
Message-ID: 48885063.1000402 () lyx ! org
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Charles de Miramon wrote:
> Jürgen Spitzmüller wrote:
>
>    
>> Abdelrazak Younes wrote:
>>      
>>> That looks interesting indeed. Putting the development list in copy.
>>> Jürgen, José, do you know about that?
>>>        
>> I heard of it. But I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to markup languages.
>>
>> Jürgen
>>      
>
> TEI is an archival format. I doubt it is suitable for LyX.
>    

If we can add some TEI compliant tags, I don't see why we cannot do so. 
But we don't have to support that natively, an XSL stylesheet will do 
just fine.

> Like Pavel, I'm very dubitative of a move to an xml format. If you look the
> wordprocessing xml initiatives, they have all been failures (docbook,
> xml-fo / xsl-fo, xmltex). Odf succeeded more because of Microsoft's hate
> then anything else.
>
> Xml is slow to parse,
That's a generalisation that is not really true, it really depends on 
your XML syntax. We are free to do what we want, so I am pretty sure the 
parsing will be as fast as nowadays. Really, do you see an increased 
difficulty when parsing <document>...</document> instead of 
\begin_document...\end_document ?

>   the text is buried in very noisy formatting
> information and is difficult to hack.

That's also a generalisation, we are going to make it easy to parse. In 
any case, certainly easier to parse than current format.

>   In my opinion, history has proved it
> is not adapted for wordprocessors.
>
> Lyx final product is LaTeX / XeTeX code. Why not keep a format that is
> parsable subset of LaTeX and can easily evolve when more and more LaTeX
> features are added to LyX.
>    

Because XML is easy to transform. That is really the *main* reason. For 
example the transformation to TEI will be very, very simple, believe me. 
Not only that, but also transformations to HTML, ODF, etc. Heck, even a 
transformation to LateX would be possible if one day we decide that it 
is not worth maintaining the LateX code in C++.

Abdel.

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