What would be the relationship between HDL and authoring languages?
Like SDL, the HDL contemplated by the proposal is not intended to be an authoring format but rather the target of a conversion process from some other format optimized for authoring or data retrieval. The most obvious source format for HDL would be HTML, presumably HTML 3.0, which is here assumed to be a refinement of the existing HTML 2.0 without the addition of typographical controls. A conversion script to produce HDL from HTML is obviously a prerequisite to this plan, but such a script would be relatively easy to develop. It may be wondered what advantages a conversion process would have over the implementation of format controls directly in HTML. There are several aspects to this question. First, it is necessary to distinguish between the need to control the typography of documents in order to produce a distinctive appearance and the need to adopt a completely different appearance for each document. The former is quite common; the latter is quite rare (except in advertising). Typi
