- From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Date: Thu, 19 Jun 1997 15:27:54 -0700
- To: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
At 06:23 PM 19/06/97 -0400, Paul Prescod wrote: >It seems odd to me that we are going to add complexity to help people who >need to publish databases but remove complexity required by people who need to >publish large, complex documents adhering to large, complex DTDs. Aren' >t large, complex documents with large, complex DTDs the reason we are >*here*? I am concerned about this shift in focus from publishing large >documents to solving the world's problems. For authoring large complex documents, we already have an excellent solution: SGML. For delivering them on the Web, XML does just fine; it will be trivial to generate documents in an SGML system just dripping with inclusions and PEs and &-groups and whatnot, and pump out the instances, which will be well formed. The fact that this document delivery format is being embraced by some unforeseen application groups is a pleasant surprise and not one of the things we set out to achieve. And Berners-Lee was just trying to support collaborative Physics research. And yes, it seems to quite a lot of us that we should indeed go to some trouble if as a result we get to capture the world's metadata in a relatively sane format. Metadata *definitely* looks like a nail to me. -T.
Received on Thursday, 19 June 1997 18:29:50 UTC