Re: The underappreciated merits of HTML

John,

Just for this cross-post (and top-post; sorry!) I'll do the old <AOL>I
agree</AOL> with your philosophical point.

I do still think there are other considerations re: MicroXML, though, so
I'll take further response to that list.

--Uche

On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 8:12 PM, John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org> wrote:

> I received two emails today both referring to HTML, and it seemed to me
> that they only required a single answer, so I'm taking the unusual step
> of cross-posting to two unrelated lists.  Follow-ups will presumably
> land on whichever list you are on.
>
> On public-microxml, Uche Ogbuji wrote:
>
> > I am not so convinced that people will suddenly start using HTML as
> > their tag lingua franca in MicroXML.  If they did, they would more
> > likely just skip MicroXML altogether and stick to an HTML toolchain.
> > I think we can have human-readable documents in the vocab of choice in
> > MicroXML and then have them transformed to or dressed up as HTML at
> > the edges of the toolchain.  That's the predominant approach today.
> > There is very little use of XHTML, even XHTML5.  Data people use XML
> > assembled from their DBMS and fling it at XSLT.  Content people use
> > richer vocabularies (e.g. DITA, Docbook, etc.), or wizards that do the
> > same under the bonnet.
>
> On license-discuss, Larry Rosen wrote:
>
> > [C]onverting to plain text destroys information useful for human
> > beings to comprehend the license. It is like removing indentation and
> > line endings from source code. Please don't encourage old-fashioned
> > ways of representing licenses so they can't be easily read by the
> > only ones that matter: Human beings.  This is part of my existential
> > battle, including within Apache, to acknowledge that HTML allows for
> > a richer vocabulary of expression. Quit down-versioning our creative
> > works. :-)
>
> HTML as a format has suffered so dreadfully from its abuse that HTML as a
> vocabulary has, I believe, been downgraded as well.  As Uche says, people
> with a lot of documents to deal with tend to treat HTML as a pure output.
> It has become a fundamentally binary format, as uneditable as PDF and
> as opaque as Word 97 format, and I think that's really unfortunate.
>
> This bias is so pervasive that once when I was working on an XML document
> format, I suggested the reuse of simple HTML element names like p,
> blockquote, em, strong, etc. on the grounds that they would be familiar
> to anyone working with the format.  This was immediately shot down by
> the rest of the team, on the grounds that the users would assume the
> document format was HTML and try to use it as such.
>
> However, they were so vehement about it that I think the unexpressed
> subtext was, "If it looks like HTML, the customers will treat us as
> HTML monkeys instead of document type designers.  We have to make it
> look different so they'll know it's Real XML."  Indeed, I take this
> opportunity to praise the DITA creators for having the courage to reuse
> HTML names in their document-oriented standard.
>
> Similarly, when I was working at Reuters Health, all our HTML output
> was in fact XHTML, so when people asked us for an XML format, I urged
> them to get the HTML and feed it into their XML toolchain.  "No, no,
> that's HTML; we want XML."  "It *is* XML, well-formed XML, all of it."
> "You don't understand.  We want XML, *not* HTML." ~~ /me grinds teeth ~~
>
> I think that one of the things MicroXML may be able to provide
> is a revitalization of HTML the vocabulary as a reasonable choice
> for the construction and maintenance of straightforward documents.
> It's really not so bad for writing simple uncomplicated documents like
> software licenses or W3C standards -- indeed, I wrote the XML Infoset
> Recommendation entirely in HTML.
>
> Of course, I'm the guy who put together the Itsy Bitsy Teeny
> Weeny Simple Hypertext DTD, so you'd expect me to say that.
> See http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/ibtwsh6.rnc (or .rng or .dtd).
>
> --
> There are three kinds of people in the world:   John Cowan
> those who can count,                            cowan@ccil.org
> and those who can't.
>



-- 
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