Re: A proposal for the sectioning commangs

[John Culleton <john@wexfordpress.com>]

On Friday 21 June 2002 09:46 am, Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:
> Hello,
>
> one of the main features of both ConTeXt and LaTeX over plain TeX
> is their heavily "object-oriented" approach to source writing,
> giving a large set of useful tools to build well-structured
> documents.
>
> There is though one aspect which has not been addressed in either:
> structuring of the sections. One still uses \chapter, \section,
> \subsection etc to denote the start of any of these, while
> structured writing would call for \startchapter ... \stopchapter,
> \startsection ... \stopsection etc.
>
In my very humble opinion this is a big part of the problem with tools
such as XML and its children. Using two tags where one will do is just
excessive clutter, and ends up with lines like
\stopsubusubsection \stopsubsection \stopsection \stopchapter
.... which is all superfluous code and offers the chance for keying errors on 
every tag.  The computer is smart enough to know that a \chapter head 
terminates all previous subordinate levels. And the person reading the code 
is smart enough too. I see no virtue in this proposal. 

No matter how elegant the code looks, in fact it is just a means to an end, 
and the end is a publication, and all those meaningless stop tabs won't
afffect the final document in any case. 

Just my 2 centavos.

John Culleton
(programming since 1968, and it shows.)

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