Re: [Texmacs-dev] TeXmacs server

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Sun, Jun 04, 2006 at 02:02:40AM +0200, Henri Lesourd wrote:
> >This is an essential point. But as TeXmacs is available under different
> >OS (Windows, ...), this is not a really blocking point.
> >
> It remains quite blocking, look : can you go in a cyber cafe
> and use TeXmacs to access your Wiki ? Answer : most of the time,
> no. Speaking about Windows-based environments, can you expect
> that the average system administrator will accept to install
> TeXmacs on his network ? Again, the answer is, most of the
> time, no.

My point here is that the Wiki I want to create is *NOT* a general purpose Wiki.
For the time being, its sole purpose is to make knowledge sharing between
TeXmacs users easier. People who want to do this already know how to
use TeXmacs and have access to a machine with TeXmacs installed on it.

Only at a second stage, one may consider generalizing such a mechanism to
be compatible with existing Wikis, like math editing on Wikipedia.
But I have no time to do this, so this second step will completely depend
on volunteers. It should not be really difficult, but it does require
the establishment of a very precise data format which can be used both
by TeXmacs and other wikis in a 100% reliable manner. LaTeX is no good
for this.

> >As Joris underlined, a scalable approach:
> >
> >1. allows the user to write a document in his prefered language;
> >
> >2. uses an *automatic* computer system to find "things" to translate
> >   and find translation if already known.
> >
> The only problem is that it seems highly irrealistic to
> imagine doing this if you expect being easily able to go
> beyond simple word-to-word translations.

!? It suffices to build a dictionary (like for the .po format),
but with TeXmacs trees as entries and translations.
Such trees should be as small as possible (they may be entire
documents, but it is preferrable to take paragraphs or even
sentences (harded, because less structured)).

> As far as I know, a huge amount of funding has been invested
> since the sixties for the purpose of designing automatic
> translators, and the main result of this research is :

We are not talking about automatic translators here.

> >[2]  http://lists.texmacs.org/wws/arc/texmacs-users/2006-04/msg00030.html

I cannot access the litiguous document anymore.
It is true that problems sometimes occur with older documents.
But, in my experience, and although I agree that such bugs
are the most severe ones, this is extremely rare.