Focus on markup (was Re: Namespace: what's the correct usage?)

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

On 20 May 2001 14:08:44 -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> <flame>
> What you are emitting is blatant This-Or-Nothingism: i.e., because not
> every detail of the pragmatic interpretation of a message is constant
> from node to node, nothing but the bare surface syntax is.  This is
> another version of Humpty Dumpty's interpretation of "glory" as
> "a nice knock-down argument", and is self-evidently absurd.
> </flame>

Uh, John - 

You may not like it, but all Walter's saying is that markup processing
should (in his view) be about markup, not about types and other
additional information which is clearly not intrinsic to markup.

If you'd rather work with the PSVI, go for it - but don't inflict tools
and interpretations on us poor markup-centric folks which require an
understanding beyond the markup in the document.

If you want to build processing layers on top of the markup, that's
fine.  Just remember that such layers aren't intrinsic to markup or
necessarily to XML, unless perhaps you want to re-write the name as
"Exessively-Extended-Beyond Markup Language."

Think of it as a reversal of Ted Nelson's "Embedded Markup Considered
Harmful", or perhaps a more extreme take on the 'monastic' approach to
SGML which got us XML in the first place.