[LINK] Killing the Web?

[richard@auscoms.com.au]

Linkers, 
<verbose>
The author seems to be mistaking the purpose of XML. You can't have
"extensibility" if you then say "but we don't want anybody to extend anything!"

Mr Dvorak is confusing the freedom to define schemas with disintegration of the
underlying standard. The distinction between schema and standard is _part_ of
the standard.

The purpose of a schema is to say "if I send you an invoice, could we agree that
the 'price' field means the same thing at both ends?" -- and it doesn't even
require that database fields are presented in the same order, just that "price"
means "price".

There are plenty of examples where user A won't even want Schema B. For example,
the IETF proposed call processing language is an XML schema -- so that I could
use the same <redirect> command in different vendors' products. But why would I
want a Web browser to read the <redirect> command directly in XML? 

(As for the assertion that HTML is simple. Ha! So why is it used so badly?)

"Private" schemas pose no problem either: you send the schema with the XML
document. The application derives display properties from the schema, then
displays the document. 

Next, his complaint about parsers. That someone (not the browser user, by the
way) should have to choose a parser somehow offends Mr D. That's about the
damn-silliest argument I've heard in a long time: it's a choice of deployment
platform, nothing more. You could as well argue that because there's more than
one Web server platform, the Web is a degenerate mess.

Developers will choose parsers for things like performance, ease of deployment,
integration, OS support, price, etc. But that's no more significant to the
person viewing the information than whether the server is Apache or IIS. 

BTW, if the W3C thinks XML kills HTML, why is it continuing to develop HTML
standards? 
</verbose>
.
Problems do exist, which I'll skip for now. Pardon me while a grab the cluestick
and look for Mr Dvorak...

Richard Chirgwin

____________________Reply Separator____________________
Subject:    [LINK] Killing the Web?
Author: "Tony Barry" <me@Tony-Barry.emu.id.au>
Date:       6/10/00 10:26

<http://www.zdnet.com.au/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2636521,00.html> 
Killing the Web?
Things keep change with the Internet and the Web. The elegant 
simplicity of plain HTML is being shoved aside in favor of the 
increasingly complex XML scene.
-- 
---
phone  +61 2 6241 7659
mailto:me@Tony-Barry.emu.id.au
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On Aboriginal Policy
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