Some other open document standards that preceded XML offer a similar rigor and should not be overlooked. TeX is one such widely-spread document format that has been a favorite among the scientific and technical community for a number of years and, thus, is better supported on a wider variety of operating systems than any other standard. Additionally, several TeX editors can export to Postscript, XML and many other standard document formats. This offers a flexibility similar to XSL and makes it possible to produce any document format a situation demands, using the exact same editor. Topics appear on the left, aligned with the related information's start.
Content appears on the right and is separated by ledger lines.
While several other documentation methodologies were later developped, IMAP has the main advantage of being readily accepted by a wide variety of international organizations, which enables an immediate receptivity by the targetted audience. Therefore, unless your organization has developped its own documentation standards, using IMAP is the simplest, most efficient and most practical solution, if only because it is a tried and proven, abundantly documented and readily available method. While IMAP offers a presentation that is extremely well adapted to technical writing, it is completely unappropriate for situations requiring more prosaic texts, such as brochures, newspaper articles, press releases or multimedia presentations. For these situations, a more traditional literary succession of paragraphs is better suited. However, the usual recommendations regarding document structure and proper usage of markup language still apply, for rather obvious reasons.