>> Of course, what that also ends up meaning is that only one program can 
>> understand it.
> 
>   Basically only MS Word understands .doc files. Your point? ;)

There are lots of converters between different 3D file formats - but few 
for SDL. This is obviously partly because SDL can describe things that 
aren't polygons - but it's also got a lot to do with SDL being scriptable.

I guess if you could split SDL into a scene *description* language and a 
scene *construction* language, at least the description part should be 
pretty portable. (And if you made it an XML application... OK, I'm 
kidding!!)

You have a kind of similar thing with XSLT. With XSLT, you can take a 
hand-written document and transform it into something more elaborate by 
a sequence of fairly arbitrary transformations, resulting in a new document.

[I think that's the difference really. When you "run" an SDL script, you 
don't end up with a new, finished, description. It exists only 
temporarily while the scene renders. Mind you, in many cases it would be 
*huge*...]

>> OTOH, HTML can be parsed and manipulated with 
>> tools like XSLT by a miriad of programs...
> 
>   OTOH, HTML sucks for creating publications with good layout.

Well, HTML itself doesn't [or shouldn't] do layout. That's what CSS is 
for. And either way, the technology is definitely *not* designed for 
paper. It's designed to look good on a computer screen. Hence a while 
different set of design decisions...

>> - The end result just looks more "formal" and arguably "professional" 
>> than something thrown together with Word [yet takes about the same 
>> amount of effort].
> 
>   LaTeX creates superb scientifical papers by default. OTOH it's not so
> well suitable for other types of publications, for which MS Word may have
> ready templates.

You're probably right about that.

In fact, trying to write my CV with LaTeX proved more or less 
impossible. LaTeX is trying to do all this cleaver automatic layout for 
me, and I'm trying to control it and make it put elements in specific 
places so it fits on one page... I ended up using OO instead.

Similarly, if you wanted to put together something like an advert or 
poster, TeX would be a very bad choice. It's really designed for writing 
long documents, not 1-page custom-layout things like that.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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