Many of us who wrote articles for the Bell System Technical Journal would disagree. The BSTJ publishers could transform something that made sense when viewed as troff output into unintelligible gibberish. You cannot split a UNIX command line into multiple lines just because it "looks better". Sometimes format really matters.
I think that is true for any scheme -- professionals and editors need to work together. That's what Jon was suggesting. When they don't have shared vocabulary/goals - bad things can happen. FWIW: I can not speak for him directly as I never had this conversation with him (Win might have), but from what I knew/know of Brian Ried I think he might agree with what I'm suggesting. IMO, there will always be cases like the one that you described. This is not particular to any document compiler system. The question is how to bring the two sides together and who has the high order bit?
In one of his blogposts Douglas Crockford has suggested that Scribe would have made a better
declarative markup language than SGML!
If you read Bibtex's manual they talk about <some feature> being put in for SCRIBE compatibility. Even the bibliographic reference form looks SCRIBE-like. For example,
@Article{Arrabito:EPODD-1-2-117,
author = "R. Arrabito and H. J{\"{u}}rgensen",
title = "Computerized {Braille} Typesetting: Another View of Mark-up Standards",
journal = j-EPODD,
year = "1988",
volume = "1",
number = "2",
pages = "117--132",
month = sep,
}
But in a sense the Scribe markup is at a different level than troff or TeX. LaTeX is more declarative, which is one of the reasons for people preferring it to pure TeX.
My complaint with Word and the like, is that the 'control' is hidden. It's $%^& magic -- why is it indenting here? Hey I did not tell it to make it go italics ...
Word is lower level than TeX/troff.