Re: Minutes from 16th November WCAG WG telecon

> That's not really a "pure fact" -- it's just the holy scripture of
> what you happen to believe.  (In any case, the whole sentence from
> "if the Semantic Web..." to "...is going to cause problems" is
> very opaque even to a technical reader like myself.)

Therefore, it appears to me that the only reason you believe that it isn't
pure fact is that it is too "opaque" to you: i.e. you don't understand it.
Mr. Loughborough has given a little clarification as to what I am talking
about, but I'm afraid the SW is quite ambiguous, and it just takes
experience.
Quoth Mr. Loughborough:
[[[
The payback for the extra effort is what all my "mumblings" about  including
metadata in stuff published on the Web have been about. Making  stuff
machine-accessible will make accessibility much more achievable. That a
Semantic Web's possibility is enhanced by the principles in the  guidelines
and the tools we furnish to assure their implementation is clear. As the
immortal Charles "Yardbird" Parker wrote "Now Is the Time!"
]]]
Good ol' Charlie Parker! The Semantic Web outline further asserts partial
comprehension, schema validity, and proof validation. Please read
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html for more information - many of
the suggestions there are excellent.

> The problem is that you think it matters whether or not HTML
> is SGML.

Well, it clearly is, so that isn't the problem: to clarify, *all* markup is
SGML. Thanks to the kind person who points out that SGML was invented by
Charles Goldfarb.

> Ultimately, it doesn't matter one way or another in the majority of
> real world applications; in a practical sense, it's at best an
> interesting bit of historical trivia.

I don't follow. SGML *is* markup: it's the ISO standard for it, and it is a
direct synonym of what we call markup. Are you saying that all markup is
historical trivia (apparently you are).

> A dogmatic insistence on

You use the word "dogmatic" more than I use the word "implementation"!

> this being important may lead to driving away people who don't
> understand or want to understand SGML, and to confusing people who
> want a real world, practical answer about why they should do something
> rather than one based on theoretical underpinnings of a language
> they've barely heard of and never used.

SGML barely heard of, and barely used? XML, HTML, XHTML, MathML, and in fact
hundereds of thousands of other langauges are all SGML! Your statement is
one of the strangest things I've ever read...

> Note that I don't necessarily disagree with any specific items
> you've raised -- I simply think that a better answer is needed than
> simply the purely academic response of referring to SGML and
> pretending as if that is a satisfactory one.

I'm not pretending: it *is* satisfactory. However, I have still provided the
point about the SW and RDF data models and so forth. I suggest that anyone
actually following this debate with any real interest rather than the comic
value that I see it for should read up about the following subjects:-
1. The History of the Web (early HTML etc. see www-talk)
2. The Semantic Web, and it's design principles. Dan's comparison to the
early Web is very useful (Dan Brickley)
3. RDF Data Models/Syntax/Schema
4. The History of MarkUp, SGML etc.
5. Semantic User Interfaces
At the end of researching and understanding that, I defy anyone to even use
the phrase "presentational markup" in a rational discussion.

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 17:40:20 UTC