XSL and the semantic web

[Marc.McDonald at Design-Intelligence.com]

I think the point was that <H3>Joe</H3> has lost the fact that 'Joe' was a
name (<name>Joe</name>), and similarly with the phone number. It is not
arguing that the employeeness or status is being requested (elements not
rendered) - just the original element identification of those elements which
are presented.

It comes down to a difference between CSS and XSL(FO):
FO's force you to reconstruct your elements as formatting objects which lose
all contextual information from the original (both nesting and element
identification). In this way it is like translating to HTML (which was the
example). 

If I wanted to search for the name 'Joe' or the phone number I could get as
many false hits as I do with HTML sites - nothing identifies a name or phone
number.

CSS on the other hand would have kept the employee and phone elements and
just added the attributes to describe the 1st as a heading level 3 and the
second as a paragraph.

Why should seeing information in a formatted form destroy its organization?
If it were presented as a form or table I could see writing HTML examiners
that look for labels for cells and headings for rows/columns just to get
back the original element names.

Why does information have to be destroyed for presentation? It is not
required (CSS doesn't do it). I haven't seen some groundswell of 'Please let
me destroy the organization I worked so hard to put on this data'

Looks to me like grasping at straws to justify FO model.

Marc B McDonald
Principal Software Scientist
Design Intelligence, Inc
www.design-intelligence.com <http://www.design-intelligence.com> 


	----------
	From:  David Brownell [SMTP:david-b at pacbell.net]
	Sent:  Monday, June 21, 1999 12:30 PM
	To:  Marcelo Cantos
	Cc:  xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
	Subject:  Re: XSL and the semantic web

	Marcelo Cantos wrote:
	> 
	> > > If the semantic content is a "web" then anything short of
looking at
	> > > the whole web at once (yeah, right!) is looking through a
"firewall".
	>
	 > ... the following two transformations:
	> 
	>   <employee status="active">
	>     <name>Joe</name>
	>     <phone>555-12345</phone>
	>   </employee>
	> 
	>   <H3>Joe</H3>
	>   <P>Phone: 555-12345</P>
	> 
	> Are of a fundamentally different character.  It is not a simply
case
	> of having more or less information.  In the second example, even
the
	> structure of the information you are entitled to (and this from
the
	               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
	> owner's viewpoint) has been lost, and gratuitously so.

	And there we catch the essence of a philosophical divide, I think!
	(Not the one about not counting structure as information.)

	On what grounds can you claim "you" are "entitled" to such
information?
	Have you any legal "need to know"?  Have you entered into an
enforceable
	contract, with penalty clauses if you misuse that information (e.g.
sell
	it to a competitor or other unauthorized entity)?  Who are "you",
and
	why should your interest trump the "owner's" interest in reducing
the
	risks inherent in sharing information with you?


	As I said earlier:

	> > Turning data into presentation-only data is just another
transform, in
	> > any case, for all that it's a bit more apparent how much was
removed.
	> > Clients don't generally have any "right" to see that extra data.

	I can accept that some folk don't like the FO part of XSL.

	What I can't accept is justifying such a dislike on legal grounds,
	when in fact when you bring law into it you're more likely to find
	reasons for "firewalling" data than otherwise.

	- Dave

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