{\page \name={Latte plans}

 Here's what's planned for Latte beyond the current release.

 {\ul
  {\li {\b Other translators and tools.} Translators to languages
   other than HTML would increase the usefulness of Latte.  One vision
   is for marked-up text to always be writable in Latte format, then
   translatable to whatever language is required for its final
   processing step (HTML or XML for documents destined for the web,
   TeX for documents destined for the printer, ASCII for documents
   destined for plain-text displays, etc.).  Whether that's actually a
   desirable goal is an open question, but it's certainly an
   interesting idea.  At any rate, additional translators can only be
   a good thing.

   There is a niche for tools that process Latte files without
   necessarily translating them.  For instance, a Latte
   dependency-tracker can determine what files a particular one depends
   on via calls to {\tt \\file-contents}, {\tt \\include}, and so on.
   This would aid in writing accurate dependencies in Makefiles.}

  {\li {\b Higher-level libraries.} The functions now available in
   {\tt latte-html} provide a bare minimum of basic functionality plus
   HTML equivalence.  They don't include any useful higher-level
   functions to assist with such things as page layout---you still
   have to write HTML-analogous code.  Of course, Latte allows you to
   encapsulate that code as reusable functions, and indeed many such
   functions have been written by Latte users for specific purposes.
   Some of those functions should be cleaned up, documented, made more
   general, and assembled into a useful library.

   Another set of high-level functions could abstract away the details
   of the target language.  It should be possible to write a single
   Latte document that can produce both HTML and TeX, for example.
   But a Latte file containing calls to {\tt \\img} and {\tt \\h3}
   clearly has an HTML bias, whereas a Latte file containing calls to
   (hypothetical functions) {\tt \\setlength} and {\tt \\verbatim}
   clearly has a TeX bias.  A set of common markup functions that
   translates well into all target languages could be just what the
   doctor ordered.}

  {\li {\b Richer string handling.} Latte needs some Perl-like
   facilities for pattern matching, composition, and decomposition of
   strings.}

  {\li {\b Improved system interface.} Latte should be able to perform
   file operations such as linking and unlinking files, testing access
   permissions, reading directories, and so on, as well as other
   system operations such as querying the current time, getting and
   setting environment variables, and so on.}

  {\li {\b Mod_latte.}  An Apache module that can serve Latte
   documents, translating them to HTML on the fly.}

  {\li {\b Character set awareness.} Presently, {\tt latte-html}
   presumes the character set of the text in its input is ASCII or a
   superset thereof (such as ISO Latin-1).  It should become possible
   to advise {\tt latte-html} that the text is in some other character
   set.  This would produce character set information in the generated
   HTML file, and would also affect which characters undergo automatic
   character-entity translation and what entities they're translated
   to.}

  {\li {\b Better debugging.} The debugging output produced by
   {\tt latte-html{\c-nbsp}-d{\c-nbsp}eval} is voluminous and useful
   only to the very dauntless.  It should be possible to usefully
   restrict what output is seen, and that output should become more
   representative of the actions of the Latte engine.}

  {\li {\b Visual Studio and CodeWarrior plug-ins.}  {\tt latte-html}
   is basically a compiler, and as such would work very nicely in IDE
   (integrated development environment) systems, such as Visual Studio
   and CodeWarrior.  Coupling Latte with an integrated source code
   control system and FTP upload tool in an IDE would create a
   powerful and complete website publishing solution that would
   compete effectively with existing (and unreasonably expensive)
   commercial systems.}}

  Do you have other suggestions?
  Please {\a \href=correspond.html let us know}!

}