Re: A proposal for the sectioning commangs

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

At 11:27 AM 6/21/2002 -0400, John Culleton wrote:
>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.

a \start/stop option would be an extension, not a replacement, so you can 
still code minimal;

also, the stop thing is really needed for more complex layouts since we 
need trigger points

Hans
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