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To reiterate an old point, Simon: the problem was not adopting SGML, it was adopting The SGML Way. The Tower of Babel was sellable as a project because everyone shared a single language (community) and means to choose (king/practice). After it fell, they had multiple means to choose (kings and communities) among means. They were sometimes confused in the marketplace, but each in their own market, more prosperous. 1. Registration of schemas is control of resource definitions, not control of the application or choice of resources. It protects but does not govern. 2. The big schema projects are only as useful as the users commit to their observable use. In many cases, it would be better to design different languages AND the means to negotiate aggregates (sort of what I thought RDF and Topic Maps are good for). 3. Tools have to enable merging and detection of conflict. The ontologists have spelled all this out in detail. 4. Discovery based negotiations work better aka, bootstrapping meaning, where the communicative a priori is not yet realized. Even then, verify often. 5. The means to choose the means is the essence of decentralization. Resources are more efficiently applied and controlled by decentralized systems. We lose too much energy trying to force it all to one design. Again, the lesson of HTML is that it starts the discourse but cannot be the control for all designs. Gencoding ultimately fails to control all systems efficiently. That is why generalized markup was invented some three decades ago. That is why the XML modifications to markup design improve its use on the media (the web) but have not altered the fundamentals of practiced application. Study the history to invent the future. When the 'generalized' was dropped in favor of 'extensible' an important lesson was forgotten. Len http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -----Original Message----- From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@s...] What I am worried about is a lot of the best practices that inform the creation of XML standards and XML documents. The large-scale publishing experience that informs what I typically refer to as 'XML best practices' doesn't seem an appropriate influence on other applications of markup.
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