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Yep. If a system lets a repair technician skip
a warning or a writer inserts a caution instead
of a warning, the repair technician can die.
Then their family or company sues the company that
wrote the manual.
If anyone says 'this is not what XML is to be
used for', they missed most of the last decade
of markup work, and they should be sent to
work on paper products in Postscript. ;-)
That's not to say that all editors have to
support the rigors of technical writing.
But some do. That is likely why Arbortext
is still in business while SoftQuad isn't.
That is likely why the US Marines still
require the use of IADS fifteen years
after it was created. It's actually
stunning how well that application has
withstood the pressures to become an
HTML browser. Maybe starting with
SGML was the right thing to do after all.
len
From: Ari Nordstrom [mailto:mayfair@tiscali.se]
If the writers are free to invent
new markup whenever they feel that the current (allowed) markup doesn't
cover
what they are describing you're soon facing a situation where different
markup is used to describe semantically identical situations. This costs
money. Lots of money. Yes, it's possible to create a system that will
"gracefully" alert something or someone of the new markup, and it's possible
to even treat it reasonably well (in other words, publish the thing without
breaking anything too badly) but it will cost money.
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