I am not averse to rolling my own, I am just confused why, if environments
are so powerful and flexible (flexible meaning one can easily change things,
unlike document classes), there are no pre-rolled environments available. I
am thinking here of standardized thesis environments for universities, or a
nice letter environment to demonstrate the beauty of TeX.
sure, but all organizations want it slightly different
Okay, but that does imply that an organization can set up an environment and expect its members to use it.
Yes, I meant RDF. XML is a very important format. I find it odd that TeX can
generate PDF but cannot output simple XML. So in order to have a semantical
document I must write it in XML and then process it with ConTeXt? Is the
capacity there (through LuaTeX perhaps) to write an XML generator?
I'm not sure what you mean by a representation of a node list for a paragraph (I am new to TeX, remember), but I am thinking more along the lines of extracting Title, Author, and the content. Typesetting is not the goal, as XML is for computers not people.
maybe at some point the adobe and microsoft xml output formats become an option (which then involves resources like fonts and graphics as well so it's pretty bulky and one might wonder what gain there is)
The gain of XML is participation in the semantic web and concordance with many new data keeping rules in governments and organizations.
While I would expect the reasons for wanting XML output would be obvious, a
concrete example is that at least one journal is deprecating LaTeX because
it wants to archive all of its articles in XML.
in which case it keeps the input in xml and converts to other formats (coule be tex in the case of rendering print)
The input is actually a specific version of Word. This is converted to XML. In the case of LaTeX, the LaTeX is converted to Word and then to XML.