RE: best markup practices, different communities

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

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@simonstl.com]


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.