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  • From: John Cowan <johnwcowan@g...>
  • To: Steve Newcomb <srn@c...>
  • Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2013 12:06:16 -0500

On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 11:14 AM, Steve Newcomb <srn@c...> wrote:

Simon, I'd be pleased to see you expand on why it's unfortunate.
Several possibilities occur to me, but it would be interesting to know
which, if any, of them you are thinking about.

I'm not Simon, but I'm willing to bet that the unfortunate part is the "*merely* a serialization".
 
I think an argument could be made in the other direction, too -- that
HTML, or any other notation, should be regarded in whatever way its
authors regarded it, because that's an attitude that's fundamentally
necessary for communication between human beings to succeed.

That's the intentional fallacy.  We communicate (in a one-way sense) with Shakespeare, but we do not understand his work to mean no more than what he understood it to mean: we read far more into it than he (consciously, intentionally) put there.  And this is the Right Thing.  Per contra, your masterpiece may merely be my bibliography entry, with all of its gorgeous intentions discarded in favor of a pedestrian "who, what, when, and where".

I usually treat HTML as slightly-defective SGML; it's an attitude that
works pretty well for me.

Mmm, it would be interesting to know for sure if HTML5's mapping to the DOM can be expressed using an SGML declaration and a DOCTYPE.  My guess is that it cannot be.

--
GMail doesn't have rotating .sigs, but you can see mine at http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/signatures
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