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Tex, because it's author didn't care to reuse XML.

Having used it for publications and during the university i really, i despise Tex. Simply the language sucks, the outcome is nice, but those slashes and parenthesis really sucked.

With a XML syntax we could easily create beautiful editors, make it easy to parse with schema validation, etc.

Problem is that this card castle grew, avoiding alternatives such as docbook, and is and will always be a mess, since it's foundations are not parseable.



XML: published 1996.

TeX: Initially released 1978.

Plus, writing XML makes me puke, so even with the occasional grossness of TeX syntax I'm happy it's not XML.


An XML-syntax language? Like XSLT? Yeah, that's thriving.

The awesome editors and tools that are supposed to grow around any XML-based syntax (after the hard part -- parsing -- is taken care of), are like the modern version of the "sufficiently smart compiler".


XML 1.0 is from 1998. more than twenty years after Knuth started TeX. Even SGML is only from 1986, I suppose he could've used GML....


Doesn't Tex pre-date XML? If so, that would make it hard, even for Donald Knuth, to reuse a non-existent technology.




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