xhtml2 and user groups

There is a long and vivid discussuon now concerning "xhtml2 considered 
harmful".
Many detailed pros and cons are discussed, but I think there are (at least) 
two user (author-) groups with quite different needs:

- "academic" and
- "commercial" users.

"Academic users" are interested in clearly structured documents, with high 
temporal stability (think of reviewed documents of highest quality of 
content, which can be cited for a long time, ...
They are very near to the original ideas (Tim Berners Lee) of html.
XHTML is useful for them, because it requires valid source code instead of 
"tag-soup".
Presentation details matters much less, but a connection/linking with MathML 
would be useful.
Further useful components are:
- footnotes
- internationally agreed standards for quality attributes (from "proposal"  up 
to "frozen document" and from "unmature idea" to "proved theorem", ...)

"Commercial users" are much more interested in presentation aspects, the look 
and feel for readers, interaction aspects, security, ....
Most of them are concerned with styles, css, ... as you can see from the 
discussion.
The contents must be updated very often (e.g. stock-exchange applications), 
temporal stability is not so important.

I wonder if it would be possible to serve the needs of these very distinct 
groups with a common, but quite basic core (similar perhaps to basic xhtml) 
and additional (but standardized) modules serving their special neends.

The "x" in xhtml is a sign for this extensibility ...

Then every of these groups finds anything needed for them an has no problems 
with unnecessary details, as the discussion showes.

I will not go into any details, which you know better than I. But I 
experienced writing much better and consistant xhtml-source than before by 
using xhtml and valitating.

Kind regards

V. Risak
============================
Uni-Salzburg Computerwissenschaften
risak@cosy.sbg.ac.at
Österr. Computergesellschaft
risak@ocg.at
Web-Site:
http://www.cosy.sbg.ac.at/~risak

Received on Thursday, 16 January 2003 10:40:43 UTC