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At 1:36 AM +0100 6/8/04, Alaric B Snell wrote:
>...a web browser that gets deployed on millions of random machines
>all over the place, then instead you get developers having to test
>their HTML against a list of major browsers, and being wary about
>including things like MathML, SVG, Java, Flash, etc. in their sites.
>It appears that "in the large", these kinds of systems tend to end
>up constraining the producers of content to a schema ("works in IE")
>anyway.
Again, this is based on the same fundamental fallacy that everyone
must do the same thing with the same data. The reason we get into
these test everywhere problems is because web designers are trying to
make sure that everyone sees something pretty close to exactly the
same thing.
Provide well-formed content in XML (not Flash or Java, please) and
offer one or more stylesheets that suggest a possible presentation;
and you're good to go. That's the first step in the XML vision. It
enables readers to read content in a straight-forward fashion, while
still customizing their experience. It also allows the information to
be repurposed for tasks go beyond mere browsing, without extra effort
form the publisher.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA
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