RE: The Web as an Application

Good to hear you chiming back in !

I read your wiki ... and I agree with your email discussion ... XML is *not* a language (neither a web language nor any other) so I do tend to fall in the W3C side of this.
But to continue your argument I think you need to go a bit further ... as it is not compelling to me (yet).
You mention 
xml:base, xml:lang, xml:space, xml:id.

Only one of these (xml:base) is even close to language oriented.   and xml:base is *only* there to serve the problem which was generated by allowing external parsed entities.   xml:base doesnt let you link to anything ... it is only informational about where parts of a XML docuement may have come from that were not where you originally asked for it.   It has nothing at all to do with the application layer.

Now XInclude ... and its friends XLink , XPointer that gets a bit closer ...  but I warn you that "the community" has not been that fond of these ... so unless a fundamental comparison and improvement can  be made I dont think there will be much traction.

My opinion to date (and please keep trying to convince me otherwise) is that hypermedia be consider as its own language spec, not as part of XML itself but a layer on top of it.  Similar to XInclude ... if you can come up with a better model it may well get an amount of adoption.     

All that said though, I still am concerned that the entire concept is REST driven, which I personally dont see as a lasting model.
For a while it was very popular but recent waves of web app development have moved away from REST with the server generating the GUi and moved towards JavaScript based applications generating the entire experience (with a tight, not loose, coupling to the backend).


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David Lee
Lead Engineer
MarkLogic Corporation
dlee@marklogic.com
Phone: +1 812-482-5224
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www.marklogic.com



-----Original Message-----
From: Rushforth, Peter [mailto:Peter.Rushforth@NRCan-RNCan.gc.ca] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 05, 2013 2:16 PM
To: public-xmlhypermedia@w3.org
Subject: The Web as an Application

Hi Folks,

It's  been  quiet for a while here, but I'm still enthusiastic about the concept of XML hypermedia.

In discussing the topic off list with a browser developer, he mentioned that the substantive comment received
from the w3c on the notion of XML hypermedia is that XML is a syntax, not a language. 

Fair enough, if not 100% true: some non-syntactic concepts exist, such as xml:lang et al.

Another aspect of this problem is that XML in general is intended to be a facility which _application designers_
develop vocabularies which are _application_ specific.  Given that this is true, it is obvious that
XML should stay as far from application specific constructs as it can.

XML did not exist when the Web was invented, it came later, developed by (mostly) different people. 
It seems clear to me that if the Web is an application, that a simple set of standard constructs,
for anything, not only links, is essential.  Hence the utility of something like xml:lang etc.

What I'd like to do is elaborate on the idea of The Web, from the POV of it being a _single_ application.

I created a wiki page here: http://www.w3.org/community/xmlhypermedia/wiki/The_Web_As_An_Application

Maybe we could discuss here, and put some of the main ideas / links on there?

Thanks, and cheers,
Peter

Received on Wednesday, 5 June 2013 19:14:21 UTC