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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XSL Debate, Leventhal responds to Stephen Deach
 At 01:06 PM 6/22/99 -0400, you wrote: >"Simon St.Laurent" wrote: >> >> At 07:38 AM 6/22/99 -0400, Paul Prescod wrote: >> >But if you are going to pursue this "disabling the semantic web" stuff >> >you'll have to show that XSL is somehow better at doing so than the DOM, >> >which you seem to think is just fine. >> >> Sure thing. XSL provides a semantic-free vocabulary for representing >> content. > >One of the very first deliverables of the World Wide Web Consortium was a >semantic-free vocabulary called "HTML." It has been the target of terabyes >of dumbed-down information. HTML has been a tremendous success in that regard, letting people get started without requiring enormous understanding. However, HTML was an opening step that made the Web possible (SGML sure didn't do it), giving the world exposure to the use of marked-up text for human-readable hypertext creation. HTML's limitations became very clear fairly quickly. The agent developers smashed into it early on, having to give up their hopes because every site looked totally different and it was too hard to figure out what information was what. Regular Web developers found themselves ensnared in browser incompatibilities as competitive pressures created incompatible dialects. Turning to plug-ins, incompatibilities between browsers and plug-ins and plug-ins and information sources became enormous issues. XML was supposed to remove these obstacles and _create_ the possibility of a semantic Web. Agent developers would at least get reasonable hints to figure out what information was what. Web developers could escape the conflicts of browser-developer-mandated vocabularies and turn to formatting standards that would let them present information without having to incinerate the underlying meaning of the documents. Plug-ins might still have issues, but at least data formats could be unified under an open format that could avoid the ugliest problems of their predecessors. This dream was just getting started when it became clear that a tool that was supposed to be a key part of XML's march forward could, in fact, be used to go backward, into formatting domains that make HTML look meaningful. Not only that, but the entire architecture of the tool made such backward transformations easy and recommended practice. By putting half the spec's support on one side of a transaction and the other half on the other, one side could get all the intelligence and the other side some pretty-looking babble. XML is now facing a U-turn, before it had even really marched out on the Web. If you disagree, that's fine. Just don't try to claim that "XSL is no worse than HTML and we should all love it because of that." XML was an attempt to do better than HTML, and these claims ring hollow. >I hereby mourn the passing of the semantic web. We hardly >new ye! As part of my mourning period I now begin a three minute boycott >of the above technologies and a permanent boycott of threads discussing >XSL's impact on the "semantic web." Then I suppose the semantic Web must be stillborn, as it hasn't arrived yet. As for your permanent boycott of discussion, that may be sensible for an issue where both sides believe their arguments too strongly to give ground. 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@i... 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@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...) 
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