>>>>> "Jan" == Jan Harkes <jaharkes_at_cs.cmu.edu> writes:

    Jan> Maybe we will simply use plain HTML text, or OpenOffice
    Jan> XML. As long as editing is fairly simple and we can get
    Jan> reasonably looking .html and .ps output.

I don't know what you consider "reasonable looking", but for my own
purposes I find the various POD formats (Perl's classic pod, Python's
structured text and restructured text) excellent.  Basically what you
lose compared to plain HTML is

(1) inline font size and color control (you'd need to use CSS and some
    amount of extra code to parse new directives in the case of
    restructured text)
(2) frames
(3) use of tables to layout pages (you can still use tables as tables,
    of course)
(4) extensions like xhtml+mathml

On the other hand, editing restructured text is very natural (in
Emacs, anyway)---standard facilities like filladapt handle the
ubiquitous indented text blocks transparently.  So I added a couple of
commands to handle the special header formatting, and was happy.
Editing tables is still tedious, but talbes are tedious, period,
AFAIK.

Plain X?HTML isn't bad, though, if you banish all font and color code
to CSS.

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