ConTeXt to XML?

[Elena Fraboschi <elena@mendoza.math.indiana.edu>]

Dear all:  Sorry if this question is not appropriate for this forum - I am 
a newbie, I tried to read at least one month's worth of emails, and...

I do not come to this list from the perspective of an author, who can 
afford to give his work huge amounts of time till it is set just right.  I 
come here from the perspective of a publisher/editor (Indiana University 
Mathematics Journal), where the outlook is quite different:  You take
many papers (LaTeX source files), written by people whose expertise ranges 
from spaghetti-TeX to guru-TeX, and you "massage" them to conform to the 
Journal format and to make them look as nice as possible.  (Perfection
remains always on the horizon - you got to meet the printers' deadlines.)

That said by way of introduction, I am contemplating a move for the IUMJ
away from LaTeX to ...  I have two reasons to recommend abandoning LaTeX:
(1) LaTeX's conversion to other formats (excluding PDF) is laborius 
and falls very short of the ideal, and (2) long-term 
archiving and long-term reusability in settings we may not even envisage 
at this time forces me to think XML... XML... XML.

So, I have been delving into ConTeXt, and I like its syntax:  far 
"cleaner" than LaTeX.  I have also read that there is work in progress
to convert XML to ConTeXt --- my question is, any thoughts, hints,
recommendations about reverse-engineering, that is, from ConTeXt to
XML?  If the IUMJ switched production to ConTeXt, we would still want
to preserve on "archival" copy in XML.

(As of now we translate LaTeX to XML using "hermes", but it would
not work with ConTeXt.)  If nothing is contemplated in the
area of *from ConTeXt to XML", might this strategy work

ConTeXt -> pdf - pdf to XML ?

I apologize if the topic is off bounds, and will be grateful if anyone 
decides to think outloud on this subject.  Best, elena

Elena Fraboschi
Indiana University Mathematics Journal