why distinctions within XHTML?

[Simon St.Laurent]

At 10:11 AM 8/30/99 -0400, Ann Navarro wrote:
>At 10:12 AM 8/30/99 +0800, James Tauber wrote:
>>However, as David Megginson and Tim Bray have argued, capturing the
>>commonality between, say, "p" in each DTD is not just valuable, but pretty
>>much vital.
>
>I think that the distinctions are just as vital, from the global
>perspective, not just from an application developer perspective. 

This may sound like a stupid question, but as I stated earlier I've never
seen those distinctions as either useful or worthwhile.  

In what sense do you see those distinctions as vital?  What do they do,
apart from add varying levels of obfuscation?  What is this 'global
perspective', and how does it matter to developers and users?  

It really reads like a badly thought-out grandfather clause foolishly
insterted into HTML a few versions ago.  Sometimes history is an anchor
dragging us down rather than a useful guide to the future.

Adding namespaces to an issue that's already of uncertain value seems to
generate enormous amounts of chaos.  Personally, I'd have like to see
namespaces used to indicate modules within XHTML - though I know that
presents large problems as well - not to identify different flavors of
XHTML itself.

After more coffee, I'll try to come up with better questions.

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer (2nd Ed - September)
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
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http://www.simonstl.com

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