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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/
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