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Re: The Granularity of Markup (Re: InkML)

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: The Granularity of Markup (Re: InkML)
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 07:56:26 -0400
• In-reply-to: <3F45BB13.3080108@a...>

ricko@a... (Rick Jelliffe) writes:
>Let us imagine four constraints:
> 1) InkML must be text
> 2) InkML must be terse (faster parsing, less space)
> 3) InkML must be embeddable as part of an XML document
> 4) InkML objects must be annotatable and extendible using XML (or 
>XML-ish) mechanisms

Sorry, Rick, but while these constraints may exist in the committee's
minds, they never bother to justify their concrete decisions on such
grounds.  They appear nowhere in the spec [1] or in the requirements
[2].  Section 5 of the requirements regarding PDAs is the closest I can
find, but such justifications hardly kept Tiny SVG from using markup for
the bulk of its contents.

On #4, perhaps it would have made sense to define the trace language as
a separate language and the rest of InkML as a wrapper, but that isn't
what the committee chose to do.  The traces themselves are not in fact
extensible, only annotable.

I heartily encourage developers to use lexical approaches which aren't
XML inside of XML contexts - it helps with human-accessibility, among
other factors.  At the same time, once you get beyond a certain ratio of
markup to encoded content, it makes a mockery of using XML in the first
place - especially when the encoded content is this opaque.

[1] - http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-InkML-20030806/
[2] - http://www.w3.org/TR/inkreqs/

• References:
  • The Granularity of Markup (Re: InkML)
    • From: Rick Jelliffe <ricko@a...>

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