XSL and the semantic web

[Simon St.Laurent]

At 06:28 AM 6/16/99 -0400, Paul Prescod wrote:
>In other words I always interpreted it as being about choice. You complain
>that XSL allows this choice. Even if it were the case that XSL uniquely
>allowed data dumbing (which it is not), I could not see how its allowance
>of this choice would constitute a problem or flaw. Data dumbing is part of
>the economy and ecology of the Web. As Guy Murphy has described, the Web
>is richer for it. Do we want Lexis-Nexis to take their thousands of
>databases back to their private network where they controlled the level of
>semantics tightly?

I'm afraid we'll have to accept the value of this 'choice' as a fundamental
disagreement.  I feel strongly that by encouraging this choice, and by
providing a vocabulary that is even more formatting-oriented than HTML, XSL
encourages a greater level of server-side dumbing down than was available
before, and makes it easier.  I can't see this as a positive move in any
light, and no, I don't see the 'semantic firewall' as a positive thing for
the Web.

But then, I do see the Web from a rather different perspective than
Lexis-Nexis.

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer / Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical (July)
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)