First Sentence

"The important advantages of direct variational methods, in particular the Finite Element Method (FEM), against Finite Difference Methods (FDM) are what we call 'logical width and depth, combined with simplicity and robustness', i.e. the same additive methodological concept for a wide class of problems with simple extension to more complicated problems (e.g. from linear to nonlinear theories), and this should be possible with robustness of the solvers and parameter-independent convergence rates in regular cases."