Re: an XHTML dialect for specs?

At 12:50 PM 12/13/99 -0800, Tim Bray wrote:
>At 02:38 PM 12/13/99 -0600, Dan Connolly wrote:
> >The idea is to use on XHTML dialect for editing *and* delivery.
>
>Hmm, the current XML dialect has all sorts of semantic markup for
>stuff like BNF and conformance constraints and so on.  Switching to
>XHTML for HTML-like stuff (ordered lists, paragraphs) seems obvious;
>but I'm not sure how you avoid that batch processing step if you want
>to use fancy div/span or table machinery to make BNF look good and
>so on.  -Tim


FWIW, the XMLspec documentation discusses some of the issues surrounding 
making XMLspec a relative of HTML:

   http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/06/xmlspec-report-v20.htm#ISSUES

I'm kind of interested in the idea of "augmenting" the content of an 
XMLspec document with generated material, but worry about people editing it 
by hand when in a hurry.  (I've seen it happen in many a production 
environment.)

Also, over time, XMLspec has gotten more specific/semantic, not less, and 
all these constructs are miles away from HTML.  I'm not sure that much is 
gained by connecting them artificially, especially if we can commit 
(finally :-) to making a good, official XSLT stylesheet that transforms 
into HTML.  I believe this is what Ben Trafford has been working on.

         Eve
--
Eve Maler            Sun Microsystems
elm @ east.sun.com    +1 781 442 3190

Received on Monday, 13 December 1999 16:35:48 UTC