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I just gave a presentation at Extreme Markup Languages 2002 [1] on my
experience with out-of-line (or parallel) markup, based on an excellent
rant from Ted Nelson, "Embedded Markup Considered Harmful" [2]. It
explores my experience with Ool [3], a simple set of tools I wrote for
separating markup from the content it describes.
The slides are available at:
http://simonstl.com/articles/ool/
For a taste, here's the overview.
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The Journey - From markup to not and back again
Embedded Markup Considered Harmful: Ted Nelson's classic screed on why
embedding markup causes problems appeared in the Winter 1997 World Wide Web
Journal. For the most part, I think he's actually right. Is this a problem
for markup?
An experiment: Just to explore whether markup was capable of supporting the
kinds of things Nelson wanted to do, I wrote a set of processors which
separate the content from the markup in one phase, and which recombine the
content and the markup in another phase.
Difficulties: Maintaining the relationships between markup and content is
much more difficult when they are separated because of the obvious problem
of maintaining correct connections if the content changes. While markup is
capable of supporting out-of-line markup, it requires an entirely more
sophisticated framework. Markup is pretty much hackery compared to what
Nelson wants - good hackery, I think.
Results: Looking over this separation led me to think about how exactly we
apply markup to information. While Nelson's vision may just be too
difficult for most common use across loosely-connected networks, it has a
lot to tell us about how we interact with information, even as we violate
his principles.
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[1] - http://extrememarkup.org
[2] - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/w3j/s3.nelson.html
[3] - http://simonstl.com/projects/ool/
Simon St.Laurent
"Every day in every way I'm getting better and better." - Emile Coue
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