Re: The X in HTML

Lachlan Cannon wrote:
> 
> Philip TAYLOR [PC335/O-XP] wrote:
> > Many thanks, Jonny : so if I understand correctly
> > (after an admittedly brief reading), the underlying
> > idea is that an XHTML document shall always be statically
> > parseable for validity by reference to the DTD, whereas
> > with the "Xtensibility through macros" idea which I was
> > postulating, parsing for validity wouldn't be possible until
> > after all macros had been expanded (which isn't necessarily
> > a finite process).  I can certainly understand the desire
> > for static parsability, but on the other hand the overheads
> > of creating a custom DTD will, I suspect, make the
> > eXtensibility of XHTML little-used in practice.  Is there
> > really no case for a lightweight extensible language which
> > would allow the author to use tags of his or her own
> > choosing without the need for the formality of a DTD ?
> 
> Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the point of the set-up
> being this way is so that
> 
> a) markup tags are well thought out before being implemented -- you'd
> want to have your tags well thought out before modifying the dtd, to
> prevent having to do it again.
> 
> b) everyone and their dog won't go out and make up random, and in a
> lot of cases pointless tags, and overlapping ones with different names.
> Why would you spend 5 hours creating a DTD integrating animalML with
> XHTML when someone else has done it? Re-use of DTDs saves bandwidth
> (assuming they're cached), effort, time, and it means that applications
> don't have to be developed for 1000s of different formats -- one of the
> points of XML is saving the costs of transferring data between different
> incompatible formats.
> 
> A barrier to entry is nearly always a good thing, as long as it's not
> too big. By creating this barrier to entry, documents won't be littered
> with meaningless, or stupid tags (eg <fUnKyT3xT>, <myC00lstuFF>). People
> who are interested enough to learn how to work with are are more likely
> to consider the semantics of a document.
> 
> Again, please correct me if I'm way off here.
> --
> Lach
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Received on Tuesday, 13 August 2002 07:29:17 UTC