Re: [namespaceDocument-8] 14 Theses, take 2

In message <062b01c1bfea$c4d91ca0$0301a8c0@w3.org>, Tim Berners-Lee 
<timbl@w3.org> writes
>Hang on - SVG is human-readable, as is MathML and X3D -- all are langauges
>for material to be presentedto a human.  We are not talking about making the
>source human-readble I hope.

Why is XML a text format (indeed, a mark-up language!) if its contents 
are not to be human-readable for human directed error correction and 
limited editing?  Perhaps there is a danger in attempting to use XML for 
applications that do not have some connection to some traditional notion 
of what 'marking-up' a document actually means?

To quote from the XML specification, design goal six is that "XML 
documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear".  The context 
implies that all XML should be human-readable at source level.

(For example, RDF is for "machine-readable" metadata, certainly here 
design goal six could not apply were it speaking of some 
post-XML-parsing situation, hence it must have been referring to the 
source mark-up.)

Regards
-- 
George Lund

Received on Thursday, 28 February 2002 00:57:05 UTC