Re: document node attributes

On Fri, 2013-06-28 at 14:51 +0000, David Lee wrote:

> [Liam wrote:]
> > No, which is why it's not going in XML core.


> Can we at least make one step forwards by agreeing on this ?

I don't speak for the XML Core Working Group. However, a "one eature at
a time" approach isn't going to fly.

XML isn't used much on the Web today because of money. The business
reasons are not primarily to do with hyperlinking, although I agree
that's part of it.

The problems I see are:

1. You can't put JavaScript-based ads in XML.

2. Search engines don't know how to make useful result snippets from
XML, so XML files get lower ranking in search results. The first Google
result is worth 10 to 100 times more than the second resuly; the second
result is worth 5 to 10 times more than the first; third and lower are
worth even less, and being off the first page of results is like trying
to run an ice cream shop behind a plain steel door in a back alley with
a combination lock.

The fix to both of these is probably via architectural forms, and that
could also give us hyperlinking.

But it would need to have backing of browser programmers, most of whom
seem to hate XML with a passion, and search engine vendors, who will act
if there's enough content.


> If we can't agree on this I dont know how to proceed.
> If we can agree on this then to make progress further discussion
> should preclude the requrement of going into XML Core.
> It may mean a non-XML vocabulary, or special namespaces or
> non-namespaced attributes or something we havent thought of yet.

My "automatic namespaces" proposal is one way to do architectural forms
without using explicit namespaces; i think John Cowan is going to propse
another at Balisage this August. What I mean here is the ability to make
a simple mapping between elements and attributes in the document and
some very simple set of properties. One could use XSLT, but that has
unbounded computation, so something simpler to say, "construct a URI by
concatenating these two attributes in this way with this string" and,
"this element's contents form the document title", and, "para elements
break paragraphs".

Liam

>

Received on Saturday, 29 June 2013 02:44:19 UTC