- From: Sean B. Palmer <sean@mysterylights.com>
- Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2000 19:45:57 -0000
- To: "Anne Pemberton" <apembert@crosslink.net>, "Kynn Bartlett" <kynn-edapta@idyllmtn.com>
- Cc: <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
> If you're using XHTML as a data format, then it's no wonder you're > having problems! I know, but that's the way the Web appears to be moving (see below). > XHTML is an awful data format except for a very > small set of file types. It's actually grown to be better as a > general presentation language than as a general document data > format. I'd have to say that "XHTML 1.0" is most certainly *meant* to be a document markup language, even if people don't use it as such. XHTML 1.1 gives us some lee-way in mixing vocabularies, allowing us to mix XHTML with pure data formats. Also, the HTML WG Roadmap specifies that XHTML 2.0 will more likely than not be a pure XML version of XHTML, with no presentational aspects. Whether that will happen or not remains to be seen, but the "documents vs. data" battle is running high: just look at http://doctypes.org/ I still think that more data formats are required, and that XHTML can have certain data aspects, even if it is only a document markup format. It depends what meaning you attach to certain tags; whether or not XHTML should have a Schema, and to what extent the Web is transforming into the SW. Certainly, RDF and other such technologies to add another reqired dimension to all of this, but at the end of the day it is down to the high-level architects of the Web to decide what works. 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, 27 November 2000 14:47:26 UTC