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RE: XML, hypertext

• To: "'Bullard, Claude L \(Len\)'" <clbullar@i...>, "'Bob DuCharme'" <bobdc@s...>, "'Simon St.Laurent'" <simonstl@s...>, <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: XML, hypertext
• From: "Didier PH Martin" <martind@n...>
• Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2002 14:53:32 -0400
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <2C61CCE8A870D211A523080009B94E430752B810@HQ5>

Hi Len,

Len said:
We come back to groves for the same reasons 
the original group ended up there.  Until one has 
a neutral means to describe properties of nodes 
in a sharable descriptive language, it is tough to 
decide when we are talking about the same "type" 
of thing being addressed from multiple contexts.

Didier replies:
Yes indeed this is needed by any "software" interpreter. Moreover, by
experience, I discovered that Grove plans able to go beyond the document
model and move up (or down depending on the perspective) to the semantic
level brings more productivity and more readable code. For instance, If,
from a marked document I want to link to a particular frame contained in
a movie (1) the interpreter needs to resolve the impedance mismatch
between the types. 

On the other hand I may rely on an addressing schema and let an other
interpreter resolve the issue. But in the last case, the movie object
interpreter will need to present the same addressing model (i.e. the
same name space convention). For instance to present a tree and a
addressing scheme like Xpath (i.e. a hierarchical name space). Is
something like Xpath sufficient to do that? I Don't know but what I
remember is that people got rebuffed by the complexity of function based
addressing ( a la lisp) as proposed by hytime (and also covered in DSSSL
specs). 

In any cases, we will have to deal with different document types and I
am not talking here of markup document type but more of different
entities like HTML document vs. video or sound documents. The main
problem the web will have to face during this decade is to be able to
link text based documents to multimedia document. So to speak, to have a
link contained in a document to point to a particular movie scene or a
particular song part.

I guess the community has lost sight of the end goal and entered in
decadent Byzantine fights :-). I just hope Simon's effort will bring
back some common sense and help prepare the future and most of all, that
the group will use the lessons learned from the past.

(1) I know for several it is science fiction but, as you know, some try
to do that and documents are not all based on markup

cheers
Didier PH Martin

• References:
  • RE: XML, hypertext
    • From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>

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