something completely different

Warning: this posting has virtually no technical or philosophical content.
         and is nothing to do with linking (except insofar as EVERYTHING
         is to do with linking)

I have received what I suspect will be the first of many questions from a well
known user of SGML, the gist of which might be summed up as "Why on earth is
XML the way it is?" (Specifically, this person hadn't understood the
nittygritty of the empty-tag-kludge, was baffled by the white space rules --
particulary the -XML-Space attribute kludge, and wanted to use SDATA entities).
I answered these enquiries to the best of my poor abilities and suggested he
should seek wider discussion on the comp.text.sgml list. 

Is there a better place such enquiries should be referred to? Is the XML Q&A
document or an expansion of it available at a web site somewhere? Am I right in
assuming that this list does *not* want to consume even more bandwidth fielding
queries about done deals than it already has on procedural rules?

Sorry to interrupt the discussion on link semantics (which is really
impressive, by the way)

Lou Burnard

p.s. I have now updated my TEI x-pointer tutorial, following some useful
suggestions from Eliot, Michael, and Hasse. The new version is at
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lou/papers/XR/ (the old version in wip will disappear
momentarily) Feel free to link to it at the new address if you want.

Received on Friday, 24 January 1997 11:49:17 UTC