Re: 3.1 Introduction (Draft), review of

On Jul 17, 2007, at 12:07 AM, Robert Burns wrote:

>
> Except in relation to chapter 3 we're talking independent of  
> serialization.

You can't give good authoring rules that are independent of  
serialization, so I suggest we don't even try. Let's give authoring  
guidelines for the HTML serialization and a separate section about the  
XML serialization if called for. The latter would be for experts so it  
could be brief.

> There may be some other way to artfully avoid any discussion of  
> serialization and syntax and may that's the way to go here. However,  
> it would be incorrect to say that some elements do not have close  
> tags because that's dependent on the text/html serialization. From  
> the disagreement here and on further reflection, perhaps this  
> introduction should just avoid syntactical issues and focus on the  
> document as a tree of elements (elements with content and attributes  
> and nothing more). Then we don't need to talk about the specifics of  
> how those elements are serialized  or syntactically constituted.

That doesn't seem like it would be helpful to content authors. We want  
to help them write a document, right? If we want to help them write  
both text/html and text/xml documents, we'll need two different  
sections.

> I started off my post by saying I thought there was a danger of  
> going into too much detail here. I stand by that. I really don't  
> think a discussion of syntax is necessary in this introductory  
> section. Elements, content models, attributes, semantics, default or  
> sample presentation, etc. Forget about tags and short-hand notation.  
> That's for another chapter.

Starting novices off by talking about the document tree instead of the  
actual syntax of a document sounds unlikely to make for good pedagogy.  
The DOM is something that doesn't make much sense until you know what  
an element is.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Tuesday, 17 July 2007 07:23:24 UTC