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Slides: Out-of-line markup

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Slides: Out-of-line markup
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Wed, 07 Aug 2002 12:00:19 -0400

I just gave a presentation at Extreme Markup Languages 2002 [1] on my 
experience with out-of-line (or parallel) markup, based on an excellent 
rant from Ted Nelson, "Embedded Markup Considered Harmful" [2].  It 
explores my experience with Ool [3], a simple set of tools I wrote for 
separating markup from the content it describes.

The slides are available at:
http://simonstl.com/articles/ool/

For a taste, here's the overview.
------------------------------------------------------
The Journey - From markup to not and back again

Embedded Markup Considered Harmful: Ted Nelson's classic screed on why 
embedding markup causes problems appeared in the Winter 1997 World Wide Web 
Journal. For the most part, I think he's actually right. Is this a problem 
for markup?

An experiment: Just to explore whether markup was capable of supporting the 
kinds of things Nelson wanted to do, I wrote a set of processors which 
separate the content from the markup in one phase, and which recombine the 
content and the markup in another phase.

Difficulties: Maintaining the relationships between markup and content is 
much more difficult when they are separated because of the obvious problem 
of maintaining correct connections if the content changes. While markup is 
capable of supporting out-of-line markup, it requires an entirely more 
sophisticated framework. Markup is pretty much hackery compared to what 
Nelson wants - good hackery, I think.

Results: Looking over this separation led me to think about how exactly we 
apply markup to information. While Nelson's vision may just be too 
difficult for most common use across loosely-connected networks, it has a 
lot to tell us about how we interact with information, even as we violate 
his principles.

-----------------------------------------------------
[1] - http://extrememarkup.org
[2] - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/w3j/s3.nelson.html
[3] - http://simonstl.com/projects/ool/


Simon St.Laurent
"Every day in every way I'm getting better and better." - Emile Coue

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