Having trouble finding a word in multiple files

[Peter Flynn]

On 18/06/2020 13:32, Mike Marchywka wrote:
> [...] Verbosity is not just a waste of computer resources but
> confusing to humans.
Taken to extremes, yes. But I do NOT want to have to deal with 
undistinguishable rubbish like

    They were playing <i>La Cantatrice Chauve</i> last night.

I want to see (at worst)

    They were playing <title>La Cantatrice Chauve</title> last night.

because then I have some chance at understanding what they want to do. 
In fact, of course, what I will end up with is

    They were playing <docdb ref="IE-LCC-50" use="title"/> last night.

because that way they avoid typing errors, they can snag references for 
the index, and they can manage things like copyright and performance 
requests with legal provability. I would settle for

    They were playing \citetitle{IE-LCC-50} last night

because it's accurate and it works. But the only animal that can parse 
LaTeX reliably is the latex binary, and using that for anything other 
than formatting opens a whole world of pain that you need to avoid.

All of which is *possible* in Word, just unreliable and tedious.

> So, yes I hate xml and proprietary binary formats but in general the
> latex syntax does a great job for human readability and moving a lot
> of details like formatting into a macro def.

In the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, both XML and 
LaTeX are fine. Elsewhere it's an open invitation to a swamp of fever. 
And I find most people have a very weird idea of what XML and LaTeX 
actually are.

> It is better than html for that too as it is just glorified xml.

That really isn't true: HTML was tediously simple in XML terms, exactly 
the opposite of what XML was designed for. But HTML as used now is just 
broken XML, basically a tag soup of designer rubbish.

P