- From: Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com>
- Date: Mon, 07 May 2001 08:48:54 -0400
- To: Aaron Swartz <aswartz@swartzfam.com>, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Cc: "William F. Hammond" <hammond@csc.albany.edu>, <mozilla-mathml@mozilla.org>, <www-talk@w3.org>
At 11:45 PM 5/6/01 -0500, Aaron Swartz wrote: >I'm not sure what you mean by this, and although I've spent a lot of time in >the XML community, I've never heard it before. Certainly in data-oriented >XML formats the whole idea is for XML to degrade gracefully (ignore new >stuff). HTML has always followed this rule and I'd hope that XHTML would >continue this even further. Huh? Ignore new stuff works in certain contexts, perhaps - with CSS, for instance, when there isn't explicit formatting specified for a particular element. XML program structures, even without validation running, are typically far too brittle to ignore extra information caused by extra child elements. You'd get a lot of strange errors where documents that could be processed in certain contexts would fail in others. I've argued for a long while that flexibility (not standardization) of vocabularies is the real lesson of XML, but that's not reflected in current practice. Simon St.Laurent - Associate Editor, O'Reilly & Associates XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed. XHTML: Migrating Toward XML http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books
Received on Monday, 7 May 2001 08:48:45 UTC