Word and XML (was: XML standards coherency and so forth)

[Simon St.Laurent]

At 03:18 PM 1/21/99 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>Robin Cover wrote:
>
>> Come to think of it: why should this be "Un*censored*believable"
>> given that 99% of Net stuff is illegal HTML, despite a couple
>> generations (years) of HTML DTDs?
>
>Most of that was generated by hand, though (or by programs
>written by hand, etc.).  Ugly, unreadable
>HTML is one thing: violating basic SGML principles like nestedness
>is quite another.

To put it bluntly, 'violating basic SGML principles' isn't something the
vast majority of the HTML community has cared about - ever.  Convincing
them that they should care about 'violating basic XML principles' is a lot
easier, partly because there's a lot less to explain, but this stuff isn't
as obvious as a lot of SGML and XML folks would like to think.

There's a long road ahead, and putting it down to 'violations of basic
principles' isn't going to get us anywhere if we don't figure out how to
sell those principles without sounding like latter-day Puritans.


Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer / Building XML Applications (March)
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

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