Re: Minutes from 16th November WCAG WG telecon

> > 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

No I'm not. Have you seen the list of examples? Have you seen this excellent
point:-

[[[
If you look at the RDF data models, you'll see the reason: if the Semantic
Web is going to be a machine processable Web of languages relying on
triplets to eventually lead to proof validation, attaching behaviours to any
form of semantic processable data on the client side is going to cause
problems. The schema layer in the RDF model isn't set up to provide
behavioural display assertion; simply because that task is impossible. By
attaching behaviours to Semantics that are expected to be recognized and
displayed properly by default is wrong, and you need to back up the
proprietary assertion you are trying to make with some type of schema. At
the moment there is no form of schema available to do this, which is why we
have Cascading Style Sheet languages to help us cope in the meantime.
]]]

Argue with that pure fact if you're going to argue with anything.

> 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);

Not sure I follow at all here. IBM wrote GML. I don't know who wrote SGML
(but one of them is a WAI member). Tim Berners-Lee wrote HTML. It was Dan
Connolly who first produced an SGML DTD for HTML. In fact he accidentally
left out the "href" attribute for the <a> element! Anyway, the point is that
I haven't got a clue what you're implying: I have written many sound
arguements, but anytime I try to use something more technical, it is further
required that I explain it. All you have to do is look up the entire history
up until the present date of the WWW - surely that's not too much to ask?
Frankly, the reasons *are* there, but I have no idea about how to assert
high level principles of Web architecture to someone who asserts that HTML
isn't SGML, and then goes on to call SGML "SMTL" - and so it doesn't really
bother me if this discussion deosn't come to a sane conclusion, it's all
just a bit of fun to me!

Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
http://xhtml.waptechinfo.com/swr/
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/
http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/
"Perhaps, but let's not get bogged down in semantics."
   - Homer J. Simpson, BABF07.

Received on Monday, 20 November 2000 16:01:19 UTC