[Blindmath] A famous Texie has a change of heart

[P. R. Stanley]

>This recent Tex User's Group interview with Sebastian Rahtz, who 
>worked with TeX for 15 years, is fascinating.
>
>http://www.tug.org/interviews/rahtz.html
>
>
>"SR: When the great Jon Bosak revealed the first draft of XML at one 
>of the SGML meetings, it just seemed so right that I knew this was 
>the future. It was not that TeX-the-engine was wrong, just 
>TeX-as-input-language.
>
>DW:     TeX-as-input-language....?
>
>SR:     I mean that writing documents using backslashes and braces 
>is just not on any more. I don't mind writing style files like that, 
>but for an input document I want a syntax I can validate..."

Paul: XML as a protocol is a comprehensive and easily comprehensible 
system. MathML is merely an application of XML, two very different 
things. If someone claims to enjoy trips abroad doesn't necessarily 
denote that he enjoys visiting every god forsaken far flung corner of 
the globe. We don't know what Mr Rahtz thinks of mathML.
In any case, I feel that our famous Mr Rahtz is being misquoted here 
which is rather naughty, to say the least.
However, even if he were speaking specifically about mathML, his 
statement still fails to address the issue that I and others have 
raised already: that mathML is too verbose to be hacked manually and 
at present there are no truly screen reader friendly environments for 
creating mathML output.
What makes LaTeX an attractive choice is its terseness, the fact that 
you can typset a paper in NotePad more efficiently than someone 
struggling with MS Word.
Yet, let's be even more generous and assume that Mr Rahtz loves 
mathML is in fact planning to leave his wife and children to pursue a 
life devoted to mathML, one changed mind doesn't render a 
well-established system useless.
Still, it is the individual's choice what he does with his life. We 
all know what happened to Pinocchio when he accepted the ride to 
toytown although I reckon some have already been there. (grin)