[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: why distinctions within XHTML?
Simon St.Laurent wrote: > Mark was suggesting earlier that those namespaces would > provide information connected to schemas. This does not > appear to be a good assumption, which is most of what I was > saying. Simon - as you are, I am "outside looking in", and you're right it can be frustrating. However, my reason for making this assumption stems from the following flow: 1. The biggest barrier to the uptake of XML will not be the popularity or competence of W3C members (just kidding) but the ability to convert legacy data. 2. The easiest way to handle legacy data is to convert it to some simple XML, and then take advantage of XML techniques to make it 'nicer'. 3. Most legacy data either exists in, or can be easily converted to, HTML. (It sits behind web servers.) 4. The quickest initial transformation then, is to get HTML into an XML format that looks pretty much like HTML. 5. This can then be tidied up into more meaningful tagged data (one of the goals of XML lest we forget!). 6. There are three variants of HTML 4.0 so we need three variants of 'HTML 4.0 as XML' (let's call it XHTML). 7. XHTML will be around for a little while in these variants as browsers catch up with this evolution. 8. Eventually these variants will give way to a number of modules that handle the different features of HTML, such as a code module, a table module, an image module, and so on. 9. Once 'pure' XML documents are being sent to browsers then we will want to mix and match other XML data with the display information that is XHTML. This may mean putting XHTML inside other documents, or other documents inside XHTML. 10. Current DTDs cannot handle this, but XML Schema type solutions will be able to. 11. In the short-term we therefore need a schema and a DTD for each variant of XHTML. 12. But in the long run we will have schemas for each module. Note that unless you are mixing documents you do not need to use XHTML anyway, unless you plan to store the document in a system that requires the document to be validated. You can *produce* XHTML from your XSL transformations, but who is going to check it? No current browser is. VALIDITY TODAY So for me, the validity issue *for today* comes when I want to take legacy data and make it more meaningful (as per point 5, above). Say I have a web page from a client's intranet that has a list of all their offices, and I want to convert that to XML. For example, I want to go from: <TABLE> <TR><TD>Office 1</TD><TD>London</TD></TR> <TR><TD>Office 2</TD><TD>Birmingham</TD></TR> <TR><TD>Office 3</TD><TD>Glasgow</TD></TR> </TABLE> to: <Offices> <Office> <Name>Office 1</Name> <City>London</City> </Office> <Office> <Name>Office 2</Name> <City>Birmingham</City> </Office> <Office> <Name>Office 3</Name> <City>Glasgow</City> </Office> </Offices> without using Notepad. The HTML file has to be converted to XHTML, validated and then transformed. Each of the following will display in IE and Netscape, but would break my final transformation: <TABLE> <TR><TD>Office 1<TD>London <TR><TD>Office 2<TD>Birmingham <TR><TD>Office 3<TD>Glasgow </TABLE> <TABLE> <TR><TD ALIGN=LEFT>Office 1</TD><TD>London</TD></TR> <TR><TD ALIGN="LEFT">Office 2</TD><TD>Birmingham</TD></TR> <TR><TD>Office 3</TD><TD>Glasgow</TD></TR> </TABLE> but if you automate the process of converting to XHTML, it will map to a known 'standard' file. VALIDITY TOMORROW The validity issue *for tomorrow* is the mixing of mark-up from different XML-based languages within one document, and still being able to check that all is OK. Best regards, Mark 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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