RE: [xml-dev] Re: AF and namespaces, once again (was Re: [xml-dev ] There is a m eaning, but it's not in the data alone)

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

It was during the "well-formed only" period.  We got a bit 
lost in the hyped statements for awhile as the message slowly 
migrated to "well, we really mean, kill DTDs for something better 
we will create later".  Like the "namespaces are only for 
disambiguation" threads, it left a lot of people mistrustful 
about the emperor's new clothes.  

As Goldfarb said so many years ago, "somewhere a byte has 
to change state".  The old brouhahas over processing 
instructions was the SGML version of this same issue: 
should processing be coupled to the instance.  Deprecating 
them started about 90% of the other projects the results 
of which are still scattered around the markup landscape.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Gavin Thomas Nicol [mailto:gtn@rbii.com]

I'm trying to remember when people started assuming that a naked instance was in and of itself useful.... when the XML activity was kicked off, the charter explicitly included bits that would make XML actually useful as a generic markup language (stylesheets and linking in particular). Somewhere along the line, we lost focus of the need for things to *process* XML as part of the application.