Re: Minutes from 16 November 2000 WCAG WG telecon

At 5:18 PM +0000 11/19/00, Sean B. Palmer wrote:
>I'm going to give up on this soon. SGML is the protolanguage for all other
>markup languages. HTML is an SGML language. XML is an SGML meta-language.
>[...] Further to that, it *is* a violation of SGML to specify markup for
>presentation. There is no ambiguity about that phrase.
>I'll bet you still doubt me. Well how about this then: HTML and the WWW were
>created by a man named Tim Berners-Lee. He is the director of the W3C itself
now. When he originally wrote HTML, he wrote this:- [...]

The only problem with this whole discussion is that it is essentially
a religious argument.  You are arguing by assertion and by dogma,
saying "this is just the way it is!" and that won't fly in the real
world where people _know_ that's not the way it is; they know that
they can do very specific things, such as use presentational
markup to get effects they want, and so in order to convince anyone
that your "religion" is right, they will need to know about the
other consequences and effects of doing things as you say.

In other words, your argument only makes sense if someone is a
member of the Church of the Holy SGML (with Tim Berners-Lee as
a patron saint); if you are not a member of that faith already,
it holds no more meaning than telling someone who is not a
Christian that taking the Lord's name in vain is a bad idea.

If anyone really cared about the argument "it's not dogmatically
pure!" they'd be doing what you say already.

--Kynn
-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Monday, 20 November 2000 15:42:36 UTC