Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
Tim Bray wrote: > > At 12:02 PM 8/8/98 -0500, W. Eliot Kimber wrote: > >So I'm wondering what the true motivation of the WSP is: .... > One interesting > discussion is, which standards to focus on... my personal bet would > be XML/CSS/DOM, because the implementations are just happening. Is > it worthwhile, at this point in history, trying to retroactively > save HTML? Real question. -Tim I'm not sure what this has to do with xml-dev, other than the people, but I'll continue the thread here. I have no opinion about motives. I'm just a little guy, who would love to find ways to publish faster both to the web and to paper. XML certainly appeals to me, so any encouragement that way would help. I see several directions that would be important to pursue: 1. Talk to the *HTML editor* people. They are responsible for foisting a lot of errors on us--I don't care whether they are validated or not--they often produce such garbage (Front Page, Cold Fusion) that I can't read them with Lynx at all. The lack of a good, free XML editor is shameful (don't ask me to use emacs). 2. I use vi and some Linux tools, but one reason I do is that the *filters* from Blueberry and Filtrix included in other commercial products are useless. I'm not talking about complicated things, just elementary problems such as curly quotes and em dashes--at some point between OCR and a web page one needs to edit them by hand. There needs to be some simple rule-based filter such as Omnimark, but cheap or free. I can write some by hand in perl, but most people can't. But dealing with the white space problems is not trivial. 3. Let's face it: Netscape and Microsoft might be enemies, and they might have almost all of the browser market between them, but it will be neither necessary nor sufficient to have them agree on web standards. Because: 3a. For example, CSS1 provides for text (left and right) justification. Netscape 4's justification is force justification for the last paragraph line (thus often creating huge wordspacing on it) and Internet Explorer 4's is not force. I don't believe the standard specifies one or the other behavior. In each case, the author has no control. Much of the browser behavior that is consistent between vendors is de facto standardization, not written down anywhere. 3b. As the very example of the web pages at the webstandards.org site shows, there will always be a need for backward compatibility. Unfortunately, it is the history of web browsers that has caused all these problems, and even when version 5 browsers are released, we still have to design our pages to account for earlier ones, and text-only browsers such as Lynx. I can't see that webstandards.org can do much about that. (Well, we can stop using those features, but we don't need an organization to tell us to stop.) 4. Given that there will for a long time be used web browsers that can't support XML directly, why doesn't it make the most sense to do this at the server end? Keep pages in validated XML and filter them on the fly to HTML (whatever level your clients support) or even PDF? I realize there are problems with that-- who knows what combination of source will confuse or crash this or that browser--but at least for some time users can continue to employ the web browsers they prefer. 5. Just what level of CSS is webstandards.org going to mandate that Netscape and Microsoft support fully in their version 5 browsers? Just what level of XSL? I guess you can see there might be development schedule considerations. 6. CSS and XML are only a few of the W3C standards. I'd like to see some more encouragement for full support of the Accessibility standards (and some feedback as to how to improve them), the PICS effort, and especially the RDF effort--there needs to be an easier way to use metadata and more tools that use them, such as Dublin Core and others. 7. Seems to me that Microsoft and others are mainly interested in XML for practical, proprietary reasons: to support their CDF "push" technology, "Chrome" to justify buying a 350MHz Pentium II and get Microsoft into television markets, EDI replacements as well as on-line banking, etc. Although these efforts are based on a standard XML, the actual implementations are likely to be locked up and the otherwise "openness" of XML is lost. Standards agreements go only so far. To sum up: webstandards.org is a good idea and deserves support. Netscape and Microsoft need to be kept to their promises. We need to address more closely the significance of de facto standarization. However, we can disclose and work on some problems without having to put pressure on those big companies to do it for us. We can support the mozilla effort and work on XML/XSL etc tools that can help everybody. -- "Eric" Eric Eldred Eldritch Press mailto:EricEldred@u... http://eldred.ne.mediaone.net/ 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/ 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...)
|
