- From: Gavin Nicol <gtn@ebt.com>
- Date: Sat, 10 Aug 1996 13:37:50 GMT
- To: papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca
- CC: kmc@harlequin.com, marc@ckm.ucsf.edu, www-style@w3.org, www-html@w3.org
>I think it would be dangerous to build an information system that was >neither based on a particular set of element names NOR had a mechanism for >mapping to a standardized set of element names. That sounds like a recipe >for chaos to me. People have been doing this for some time now with less than chaotic results. The thing you folks seem to be missing is that all SGML really does is gives you a way of structuring your information. At one level, the information structures for many (most?) things can be represented using exactly the same information structure (for example, VRML, RTF). This information is a tree (or a list of lists) of attributed nodes. For such an information structure, SGML just gives you a (not particularly pleasant) syntax. The core to an application is *interpretation* of the tree. That is why I think CSS is limiting: it has only a limited capability for interpretation of arbitrary trees. If yu have a sufficiently powerful language for specifying the symantics to be associated with the tree, you don't get chaos, you get magic.
Received on Saturday, 10 August 1996 09:39:52 UTC