Hyper Tex viewer

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Date: Thu, 13 May 93 11:10:03 +0100
From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@www3.cern.ch>
Message-id: <9305131010.AA05938@www3.cern.ch>
To: Adrian F Clark <alien@postman.essex.ac.uk>
Subject: Hyper Tex viewer
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch, goossens@crnvma.cern.ch
Reply-To: timbl@nxoc01.cern.ch

> Date: Thu, 13 May 1993 10:06:00 +0200
> From: Adrian F Clark <alien@postman.essex.ac.uk>

> People might be interested to know that a couple of colleagues and  
I
> have successfully produced a hypertext/multimedia previewer for  
TeX,
> and a LaTeX style file to encapsulate these features.


This sounds very interesting. Not least, because we have a lot of TeX
and a lot of math.  Does the previewer operate on TeX files directly,
or does it need precompiling to dvi?

Obvioulsy one can convert HTML to TeX but not back.  The most  
important thing for you to stick to is the W3 addressing (URL)
syntax for the links.  This will allow your TeX documents to
be part of the web, wherever they are.

WWW servers have the possibility of providing alternative
representations depending on the capabilities of the client.
It might be interesting to look at automatic conversion of
HyperLaTex documents to HTML, with aplogies inserted
in place of equations, so that one an have universal readership
of a document with HTML, with those who can display the TeX
using that.

> The mark-up is
> still logical in nature, though no longer SGML of course.  This  
means
> that centred and flushed text is possible -- and mathematics, which  
is
> important for my purposes.  And images, sound, video,

This sounds like extensions to TeX!  I assume you point to or
embedd foreign objects like JPEG etc. Correct?

> and even limited
> interaction with the underlying system.

O-Oh... security problems?  Same applies, but for JPEG read
scipt?

> As things stand, the hypertext is not compatible with WWW but, as  
soon
> as I feel I understand WWW and HTML, I'll have a go at a previewer
> that uses a compatible hypertext mechanism.  However, I don't see  
how
> I could make it compatible with existing previewers: the features
> offered by (La-)TeX are significantly greater, as far as I can  
tell,
> than those available in any existing WWW viewer.

Certainly the author has more control over format, and can achieve
many more things.  The reader loses control over the format, unless
he can tweak standardized TeX macros which are used by the document.

Will you be able to produce a wysiwyg editor?

> ..Adrian


Tim Berners-Lee