- From: David G. Durand <dgd@cs.bu.edu>
- Date: Fri, 24 Jan 1997 13:05:39 -0500
- To: w3c-sgml-wg@www10.w3.org
At 2:34 PM 1/23/97, Jon Bosak wrote: >1. Specify the behavior without telling you what I mean, or My only problem with this is that this is something new, just for linking. IN XML I do _not_ have the ability to say how something is displayed, but not what it means. I can run my documents through a random element-renamer and tell the browser that the stylesheet is required, but then I'm still at the mercy of the browser. >2. Say what I mean and let you figure out what to do with it, or This is easy, and is supported for everything but is likely to be unpopular. >3. Specify the behavior and tell you what I mean, but require that you >follow the specified behavior regardless of what you think about it, >or Again, how does one propose to enforce this. We don't offer the option in markup for text display, because we can't. Why do we _need_ to offer it for linking. I agree that it would be nice, for some applications but it's a requirement that is made almost unenforceable by generic markup. It's even unenforceable in Acrobat, if you're willing to pick through the file and try to mangle that. Though acrobat has such a small level of abstraction, that it is _very unlikely._ >4. Specify the behavior and tell you what I mean and let you make up >your own mind about whether to follow the specified behavior. It seems to me that 4 is what we need to specify, and what we have already agreed to specify for document formatting. We allow people to use special broswers or DTDs to achieve goals 1 and 3 by enforcing additional semantics, but we cannot require such behaviors from general XML processors. >Note that what I have just said applies to both the linking and the >non-linking parts of the document and for the same reasons. If this is true, then I have radically mis-understood what we can (and intend to) offer in the non-linking display of documents. How could we enforce a display discipline on top of a generic XML parser? I can see how we can enable publishers to write XML-using software that dopes such things, but it seems otherwise opposed to the whole purpose of using XML. -- David I am not a number. I am an undefined character. _________________________________________ David Durand dgd@cs.bu.edu \ david@dynamicDiagrams.com Boston University Computer Science \ Sr. Analyst http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/ \ Dynamic Diagrams --------------------------------------------\ http://dynamicDiagrams.com/ MAPA: mapping for the WWW \__________________________
Received on Friday, 24 January 1997 12:58:53 UTC