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I agree, but some of what passed for design is is churning without progress. URLs are what pathbased directory systems have been for a long time. The HTTP protocol reduces operations to a bare minimum (that is progress). The URI is a weird but workable idea, and only weird because it is given primacy when it is actually a secondary emergent property. Relax NG is progress. XML Schema is progress. XSLT is definitely a boon but we've had transformation tools for years. These aren't fundamentals. They simply moved validation data into a different syntax then added more validation methods as any application language does. The Web did not alter the fundamentals of markup. It almost drove it into the sea by a reversion to its most primitive forms of application language. It brought a lot of money and talent and some focus to the game. 404s recognize the fact of link maintenance. The previous designers chased a phantom of link completeness, but HTTP is not markup. But if we claim that well-formedness as the basis is an innovation, one missed some progressive SGML software. Getting WFness into the spec as the bottom line was progress but also a pallative for standards guilt. We knew howand why; we got to quit apologizing for it and enduring the SGML Way tirades that wasted time and altered procurements. Fighting over well-formedness vs validity is like fighting over co-habitation vs marriage. Do as you will, but remember the children. len -----Original Message----- From: John Cowan [mailto:jcowan@r...] "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" scripsit: > The claims that the web have altered the fundamentals > of markup are without basis, hubristic, and somewhat > at the root of the restless innovation that seems to > churn applications but make no real progress. There has been real progress. URLs are real progress, even if theoretically messy: they provide an actual, functioning, de facto document identifier infrastructure. RELAX NG is progress by any measure. W3C XML Schema includes progressive features. By separation of concerns, XSLT and XSL:FO represent progress over DS+L. Unicode is real progress.
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