xml-dev - Re: LISTRIVIA: A bit of fun

[Peter Murray-Rust <peter@ursus.demon.co.uk>]

At 17:53 18/12/97 -0500, Jim Harmon wrote:
>Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
>> 
>> At 11:39 18/12/97 -0800, Murray Altheim wrote:
>> >PLEASE can you avoid having any fun. I have received private mail in
>> >support of this view and I shall be very boring in pursuing this.  It's
not
>> >difficult to avoid, and for most people it's a waste of time and money.
>> 
>> My apologies to anyone who was offended, or whose manager was offended.
>
>I've been lurking on this list for months now.
>
>Peter's post is the first one I've actually copied to friends.
>
>In sight of the holiday(s), I think it's appropriate to lighten up a
>little.
>
>Thankyou, Peter for the very entertaining post in a very staid topic
>forum.
>
>(And thank you, everyone else, for having this forum.  I learn from you
>all, every time I scan a message.)

Lets' put people out of their misery! And not let it escalate :-) Murray's
post was intended in the same spirit and contained enough allusions to be
interpreted that way. However, I wasn't *absolutely* sure and couldn't
afford to post a humorous reply if it *were* genuine. So my reply was
deadpan and covered all eventualities. [It is remarkable how easy it is to
get entangled in farcelike situations in the virtual world. One of mine,
which I dare not repeat, arose from a 1:10000 chance and let to an almost
Shakespearean comedy.]

Seriously, many SGML documents *do* look very similar to the middle of the
posting. With catalogs, SGML declarations, entity sets, DTDs, parameter
entities, etc. it is possible to obfuscate SGML documents pretty well. XML
self-denies itself the first two, but the spec itself gets off to a good
start with the "tricky" entity replacement.  XLL adds the ability of
Xpointers and SHOW="EMBED" to do some interesting transclusion. And there
is always Unicode :-) So some limited examples could be educational....

	P.



>
>>         P.
>> 
>> Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
>> net connection
>> VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
>> http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg
>> 
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>
>-- 
>   Jim Harmon                           The Telephone Connection
>jim@telecnnct.com                          Rockville, Maryland
>
Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg

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