Violation of separation of content from presentation

This is a formal last call comment to which I request a response from 
the working group during disposition of comments.

It seems to me that the design of Content Selection for Device 
Independence massively violates section 4.3 of the Architecture of the 
World Wide Web, "Separation of Content, Presentation, and Interaction". 
It is inappropriate to place the rules for specifying which devices 
should display which parts of a document in the document itself.

I have no objection to writing stylesheets that tailor the display of 
content to particular device profiles.  However, it should be presented 
as a separate document, not as a part of the original document. Possibly 
a new stylesheet language is needed to enable this.

Among other problems, the current approach will cause troubles for 
non-CSDI aware processors which will see additional markup in the 
document they are not prepared to handle, and which may hide and obscure 
the markup they expect. It also makes the documents harder to generate, 
and requires document authors to concern themselves with both content 
and presentation when the document is first created. It mean that schema 
will need to be adjusted to support this markup. I could go on. I am 
frankly astonished to see at this late date a W3C working group 
effectively ignoring the well-known principle of separating content from 
presentation.

Codi is a spec for describing how and indeed whether content should be 
presented on particular devices.  Separation of presentation from 
content mandates that the Codi information not be mixed with the 
documents it describes.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@metalab.unc.edu
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
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Received on Thursday, 5 May 2005 15:31:02 UTC