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[Forwarded for Steven Pemberton]
Date: 9/26/02 4:30 PM
Received: 9/26/02 10:30 AM
From: Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl (Steven Pemberton)
To: simonstl@simonstl.com (Simon St.Laurent)
> Then I think it may illustrate the substantial difference between
> meta-activity and activities that produce direct results. From my
> perspective, the last three years of XHTML work have been about
> pencil-sharpening, an activity which may produce sharp tools but which
> do little to hold people's interest or grab their imagination.
Well, you must remember that building a spec is about consensus
building. There are literally thousands of issues that involve
coordination with very many people, and it is all being done by people
working parttime on it.
If you or I designed a new better XHTML, we could have it done in next
to no time. But it wouldn't be very good because few eyes would have
checked it out. XHTML gets thousands of eyes checking it out
constantly, and that absorbs a great deal of our time.
> As much as I like XHTML 2.0, my greatest concern for the spec isn't
> HLink politics or anything to do with the features: I just wonder
> whether there's a large audience out there with any interest remaining
> in the subject.
Indeed. XHTML is now emerging in telephone handsets, and XForms will
add a lot of new functionality, so I am not pessimistic.
> It's taken about two years to sort out modularization, and I suspect
> that it's fair to describe their achievements as a brilliant
> illustration of the limitations of both XML 1.0 DTDs and W3C XML
> Schema. That they work now sufficiently for your needs is good to
> hear, but I still wonder who if anyone out there is all that
> interested.
In Modularisation? Few, but a few who are important.
> For my part, I'm definitely not interested in XHTML validation.
> Other than pages I've written for my XHTML book, I don't use the
> DOCTYPE declaration on my XMLized HTML documents, though I do use
> @#X! lower-case now and (sometimes) the XHTML namespace. Validation
> seems to be a fetish that's ruled the project, not something
> productive in and of itself. (I suspect that my relatively simple
> documents would in fact be valid if tested, but have no reason to
> test.)
And that is what I mean about consensus. You don't care about
validation, others do.
> I look forward to XHTML 2.0 marking a change from this pattern and
> hopefully giving a broader set of users some reason to be interested
> once again.
Agreed.
Thanks!
Best wishes,
Steven
-------------
Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA
http://simonstl.com may be my URI
http://monasticxml.org may be my ascetic URI
urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether
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