Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
Ten years back, Architectural Forms were proposed as a possible "reconciliation" mechanism for separate efforts then underway to develop DTDs for UNIX documentation. Ultimately, one of these approaches (and the organization behind it) went away and a single DTD was adopted: DocBook. A few years latter, during the craze for the Web but before Netscape and IE, the OLIAS SGML browser team at HaL Computer systems - where DocBook originated - added an HTTP client to OLIAS and used AF-based mapping to render imported HTML documents. These events illustrate one of the key issues - and reasons for early resistance - to adopting the Architectural Form mechanism as a design tool. If there's an agreement on a vocabulary at the start, there's no reason to be "more meta" by using AFs. For AF-based transformations to start to show their utility, widely adopted vocabularies had to come into use with some reason to transform between them. Note that, in this case, the reason wasn't to arrive at equivalent "semantics" - not possible since HTML supports a lower level of information transfer than DocBook - but rather rendition. The OLIAS work in effect brough the Web to SGML. Unfortunately, the under-funded OLIAS work never achieved the importance it could and should have, leaving SGML theorists to contend with, among other things, the once-infamous Netscape BLINK tag. BLINK tags were hard to deal with in terms of the "HTML is an application of SGML so the Web is really SGML" line SGML proponents liked to use. Actually, for a number of years ISO had an ambitious attempt on its books to take AFs beyond the realm of "more meta" and transforms. A number of presentations on AFs referred to them as being equivalent, conceptually at least, to virtual base classes in C++. As a rule, this analogy didn't mean much to those approaching markup from a purely tech writing standpoint, while it was met with skepticism or outright derision by OO theorists. The ISO "Standard Multimedia Scripting Effort" (SMSL) effort meant to use AFs to define object classes that included methods - "true" object-oriented design. What could we have done with SMSL? For one thing, the BLINK tag could have been defined in terms of SMSL classes. Then messages could have been sent to object-instantiations to turn the things off. There would have been other applications no doubt, but the resources weren't available to move forward with the effort and eventually SMSL was dropped from the ISO work-list. --Ralph
|
