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I'll have to contest that. SGML never made the claim
that it represented the semantics. People get confused
but the standard is not confusing on that point. SGML
was developed for a much smaller world of users whose
exchanges were among parties that did have a great deal
of apriori knowledge. Web users by contrast believe
they are exchanging blindly, but that is also a myth.
They are as much locked to the semantics of their
browser as the SGML user was. Even stylesheets are
not a new development. The web is actually not
different; just a lot more volume and a lot more
nodes.
HTML is a pretty well agreed on semantic and always
has been. It has always had interoperability problems,
but these are normal for gencoded systems. We've always
had to negotiate semantics, and blind exchange is a myth
even on the web, and probably, particularly on the web.
The continuing growth of semantically locked applications
such as Flash attest to that.
The claims that the web have altered the fundamentals
of markup are without basis, hubristic, and somewhat
at the root of the restless innovation that seems to
churn applications but make no real progress.
len
From: W. E. Perry [mailto:wperry@fiduciary.com]
Validation, whether by DTD, schema, or otherwise, is grounded in the
expectation that an XML-consuming application adheres to a contract to process
only input which conforms to a pre-agreed schematic. This is a legacy SGML
notion that has never successfully translated to the very different
environment 'on the Web'.
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