Re: SGML on the web (was: when will CSS rule)

  From: papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca
| 
| At 05:18 PM 11/20/96 -0600, Carl Morris wrote:
| >| Yes. POEM tags have extra benefits over <div class=poem>.  
| >|  * they are more compact to type and download. 
| >
| >It would require a DTD, a DTD is not compact to type and download.
| 
| That isn't the case. See http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-xml-961114.html
| section 3.2 DTDs are no longer required.
---

Um, XML is "a dialect of SGML" - it is not all of SGML.  It still seems
to me that many of the key benefits of SGML do require a DTD.  On the
other hand, DTDs *are* reasonably compact and they are eminently
sharable, so I don't really see the need for a DTD as a problem.

I still expect a future that includes good, widely-used SGML browsers
and a number of DTDs that are used for large parts of the
content-oriented material on the Web.  For instance, I expect that the
DocBook DTD would be used by a lot of authors, once effective access to
DocBook tagged material was commonly available in browsers.

Most authors are *not* going to have any interest in designing their own
DTDs, but many are going to want to use DTDs much richer than HTML and
with large enough user communities to support publishing of author aids
and training materials.

It's still the case that standard DTDs are required if we are to get the
best use out of indexing/search systems, since the best searching
requires some awareness of the semantics of the data, which means the
indexer or the search engine must know something about the "meaning" of
the tags it finds.

scott

---
scott preece
motorola/mcg urbana design center	1101 e. university, urbana, il   61801
phone:	217-384-8589			  fax:	217-384-8550
internet mail:	preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com
scott

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Received on Thursday, 21 November 1996 09:55:41 UTC