Re: Courting Joe Homepage

> At 06:53 PM 17/9/96 +0100, William D. Lindsey wrote:
> 
> > Web page authors will move to XML
> >because of the new things it lets them do, not because all they need
> >to do is replace "<HTML>" with "<HTXML>", and make sure they've
> >explicitly opened and closed all the elements. 
> >
> If Web page authors can't reference other web pages, or be referenced by
> them, without a seamless interface in their XML tools they will not care a
> fig for the extra things they can do with XML. At present XML is only likely
> to be of interest to corporations who specifically do not want their
> information made generally available on the Web. Joe Homepage will have to
> go elsewhere!

<SOAPBOX> <!-- sorry, but the details mean nothing without common goals -->

I have not had time to study all the issues that this argument impacts,
however, I believe that if the results of our efforts are only used by
large publishers/corporations we will have missed an opportunity to 
serve the greatest need.

When I look around at of the information trapped on the web in
presentational markup, aka HTML, I get depressed.  When written, most
authors are only responding to the pressure to get a page on the web
and viewable with the browser de-jour.  However, later I need to make
better use of that information and am unable to because of the complete 
lack of non-presentational semantics.  Please, XML must be able to 
improve the value of the millions of web pages.

Do we agree with this goal?
Dave Hollander

Received on Wednesday, 18 September 1996 10:50:59 UTC