- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 21:44:07 -0400
- To: "C. Bottelier" <c.bottelier@iradis.org>
- Cc: www-style@w3.org, www-tag@w3.org
Whatever the other merits of this discussion, I think it's worth pointing out that many XML documents are not and will not be intended for easy human reading and editing, regardless of the human in question. So, any discussion of accessibility of XML documents should, I think, focus on that subset of documents that one would reasonably want humans to read or directly manipulate. I don't find XML database dumps, schemas, WSDL documents, SOAP messages, etc., etc. to be particular optimized for interpretation by or direct presentation to humans. Just to find the chain of base types for a derived type from a schema document: trivial for a computer, very messy for a human. It wasn't a design goal for those formats and the results show it. That said, I think it is indeed a reasonable and important goal that >> to the extent practical, any particular document or class of document should be equally accessible to all human readers and editors.<< For some documents that will mean: very readable and accessible; for other documents it will mean very inconvenient to read. Much XML is intended to be read and manipulated primarily by machine. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Noah Mendelsohn Voice: 1-617-693-4036 IBM Corporation Fax: 1-617-693-8676 One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 ------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Tuesday, 20 August 2002 21:42:18 UTC