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I'll have to contest that. SGML never made the claim that it represented the semantics. People get confused but the standard is not confusing on that point. SGML was developed for a much smaller world of users whose exchanges were among parties that did have a great deal of apriori knowledge. Web users by contrast believe they are exchanging blindly, but that is also a myth. They are as much locked to the semantics of their browser as the SGML user was. Even stylesheets are not a new development. The web is actually not different; just a lot more volume and a lot more nodes. HTML is a pretty well agreed on semantic and always has been. It has always had interoperability problems, but these are normal for gencoded systems. We've always had to negotiate semantics, and blind exchange is a myth even on the web, and probably, particularly on the web. The continuing growth of semantically locked applications such as Flash attest to that. 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. len From: W. E. Perry [mailto:wperry@f...] Validation, whether by DTD, schema, or otherwise, is grounded in the expectation that an XML-consuming application adheres to a contract to process only input which conforms to a pre-agreed schematic. This is a legacy SGML notion that has never successfully translated to the very different environment 'on the Web'.
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