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From: "Bob Hutchison" <hutch@xampl.com>
> Sorry, but "As many as possible, but no more." isn't helping me.
A frivolous answer, but it had a serious intent: trying to enumerate
every kind of special case of idiom is a mug's game. A more general
solution that can handle a good set of typical cases is more appropriate.
For example, take all the attributes of SVG, DOCBOOK, HTML and
XSL-FO, and see what can general facility can express them.
> I'm thinking that markup can be defined to guide the writing of future
> documents. I'm not thinking that you necessarily write a document *then*
> mark it up.
People do do this, you know!
> I'm thinking that rendering might relieve some of the pressure on the
> formatting of marked up text.
Sure, but does this necessitate a single lexical form? Why is it
harder to provide the mapping from the lexical space to a value
space, but easy to provide the mapping back (i.e. when rendering)?
> I was simply suggesting that it is *not* obvious what 'sufficiently
> idiomatic' means... why one bit of markup is OK
> because it is sufficiently idiomatic, and another bit is not OK because it
> is not sufficiently idiomatic, while the *neither* is actually idiomatic.
It is not markup that I am saying is idiomatic, but text values. So
<z size="15 cm" /> for example. Or <position>75°15'00" N 43°05'00" W</position>
> So when do we stop relying on idiom and switch to markup?
It is a choice made every day by document designers.
What level of granularity to use. What are their expectations on
the libraries and parsing that will be available at the receiving end.
Cheers
Rick Jelliffe
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