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Re: limits of the generic

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: limits of the generic
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2002 10:31:09 -0400
• In-reply-to: <012001c266c3$ef148330$4bc8a8c0@A...>

Rick Jelliffe writes:
> > Does anybody *really* believe that Joe Website will be writing
> > perfect XHTML 2.0 without tools?
> 
> Does anyone *really* believe that Joe Website will be writing
> well-formed XML for casual content when forgiving old HTML is
> available?

Not "Joe Website", as John Cowan defined it, but there definitely is a
category of people for whom well-formed XML or XHTML is in fact quite
convenient.

"Dynamic HTML" is much easier stuff to write with well-formed HTML, as
browser-related vagaries about the tree structure are abolished, and the
same applies to CSS.

On XHTML-L, there are a fair number of people teaching HTML (J. David
Eisenberg, Molly Holzschlag) who have reported that it's easier to teach
people XHTML, in part becase of its clearer rules for how elements work.
For beginners, clarity may matter more than forgiveness.

Beyond casual content, I'm aware of a number of projects which have at
least partially hand-coded XML feeding into transformation systems
producing multiple output styles.  I suspect that's a good market for
the Topologi Editor, in fact!

All that said, I'll admit to having doubts about the importance of
well-formedness, but suspect that's just a side effect of writing a
parser.


-------------
Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA
http://simonstl.com may be my URI
http://monasticxml.org may be my ascetic URI
urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether

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  • Re: limits of the generic
    • From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...>

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