xml-dev - Re: Separation of formatting...

[Gregg Reynolds <greyno@mcs.com>]

Dan Ancona wrote:
> 
> Anyway, the gist I'm getting from this thread is that a rigorous separation
> of formatting from any purely generic or abstract markup in a given XML
> file format is not strictly necessary.  In fact, it could even be
> beneficial in some circumstances and for some formats.  Correct?
> 

Personally I've come around to a pragmatist position on this, after some
time as a radical Free The Text purist.  It's just not possible to
encode information without also encoding something about what we're
supposed to do with it, any more than it's possible to draw a "real"
line segment.  But we can certainly do some very useful things by
trying.

An interesting paper on a similar topic is at
http://www.sil.org/sgml/ohco1.html, "Refining Our Notion of What Text
Really Is:  The Problem of Overlapping Hierarchies."
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