Re: XML, SGML & the Web (was: Shorthand for default attributes)

>No, I don't agree with you. There are nodes in the Web, we usually
>call them documents. It is convenient for people to work with chunks
>of information of a certain size. There is usually some intuitive
>reason for putting a certain amout of information in a document, and
>it turns out that most people write documents (both on the Web and
>elsewhere) that are a similar size. Letters are one or two pages,
>articles are less than a dozen pages, books are about 300
>pages. Anything larger than that is an exception. If you look at a
>graph of the number of documents versus their size, you'll see a curve
>that falls off exponentially with increasing document size. This is
>not (only) due to the computer; it is the way people function.

Right, but there are also very good reasons for having large
documents, your argument doesn;t negate that point. 

>Anything larger is also unlikely to be hierarchical. It is hard enough
>to create a linear document of a dozen pages, for something the size
>of a book you already need several months. The Web gives an alternate
>structuring method, so use it! What is XML-link for, if not for that?

This is ridiculous. Most *large* documents are highly structured.

>And the example of the encyclopedia also shows that large documents
>tend to be very regular in structure: they are databases made up of
>records.

You just contradicted youself...

Received on Thursday, 15 May 1997 09:45:04 UTC