- From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 08:55:40 -0700
- To: lee@sq.com, jjc@jclark.com
- Cc: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
At 12:00 PM 10/24/96 EDT, lee@sq.com wrote:
>Well, I'm not on the ERB, but I do not believe that external text entities
>are essential for authoring.
I don't think anybody says SGML external text entities are essential
for authoring. A method for modular construction of documents *is*
essential for authoring, and SGML text entities provide a portable,
vendor-independent method for doing this. Lots of other non-portable,
proprietary methods could (and have been) thought of ("Master Document
View", anyone?).
>That there are people who rely on them shows how poor our SGML tools are
>right now, I suppose. A system like Astoria is (at least in principle --
>I haven't used Astoria) far better for authoring. Or should be.
1. authoring tools could indeed be better
2. once they stop having to worry about a lot of the hard stuff we're
cutting out of SGML, then they can focus more attention on basic
things like modular document construction
3. last time I saw Astoria was a year ago, but I thought their approach
[component management at the *element* level] was brutally difficult
to accomplish and didn't offer any advantages over a slick
entity-management system.
Cheers, Tim Bray
tbray@textuality.com http://www.textuality.com/ +1-604-488-1167
Received on Friday, 25 October 1996 11:56:09 UTC