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Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> Over time, I've come to write the markup along with the text, though
> it's not exactly fun.
No, that's definitely not fun... Actually, I am more and more wondering
in markup is needed in content (or at least XML markup).
One of the benefits of XML for document heads is to separate the content
from the presentation and if you take this to the extreme, your content
may become (almost) markup free.
> A content-first view doesn't seem very popular in the XML world
> at present, and I can't say I see that changing. Markup now seems
> to come first.
Although not exactly within the XML world, there are some very
successfull examples in tools which the XML world is using daily.
The first one are the mail archives. The HTML converters are doing a
very decent job to present mail archives recognizing hyperlinks and (for
some of them) the formatting tips frequently used by mail users. To be
honnest, it's "markup light" and not 100% "markup free" since they rely
on the HTTP headers which are a kind of markup to link mails to threads.
The second one are the wiki wiki webs. Here again, it's "markup light"
rather than 100% markup free but it probably meets the 80/20 rule (to
take an image which seems poupular on this list) and probably does more
than 80% of what XHTML or DocBook can do for content (I am not speaking
of presentation) for less than 20% of the pain.
A paradox of XML could thus be that it does such a good job to separate
the content from the presentation that it might not be needed for
content any longer and its tags be added afterwards to take benefit of
its presentation feature and transform a "markup light" text into XHTML,
XSL-FO, DocBook or whatever.
But that's not quite new, this is just what you did with you hypercard
application!
Eric--
See you in Paris.
http://www.afnet.fr/afnet/net200x/programme.html#T9
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Eric van der Vlist http://xmlfr.org http://dyomedea.com
http://xsltunit.org http://4xt.org http://examplotron.org
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