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On Fri, 2005-12-02 at 14:28 -0800, Nathan Young -X (natyoung - Artizen
at Cisco) wrote:
> Hi.
>
> > > Being able to present a good looking and dummy proof
> > editing environment
> > > for arbitrary XML formats would be really nice.
> >
> > I don't claim it's a trivial problem, but there are vendors
> > who provide
> > tools for that sort of thing. I personally think XForms can
> > be the more
> > standard answer, but it needs a little maturing yet.
>
> Every tool I've used needs a LOT of maturing.
Yeah. That's more accurate.
> So much so that my
> assertion is that no practical tool exists at this time. I'm actively
> evaluating solutions, and would love to be contradicted!
Hmmm. I've really just started dipping my toes in the waters. Micah
and my brother Chimezie are my "local" XForms guru colleagues. Maybe
Micah's article on the best XForms engines would help?
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/02/09/xforms.html
I asked Chimezie on IRC and his answer was FormsPlayer.
> The point here is that plain XHTML isn't enough to do a nice job with
> web delivery. I need to layer some semantic and/or formatting
> information on top in order to satisfy my requirements (and this is
> common in front end code design).
That's a strange place to have an "or", I think. If you need a semantic
layer, surely it can't be replaced by a formatting later, and vice
versa?
I personally tend to need both semantic *and* formatting information.
CSS is usually in my back pocket for the latter, with XSLT transform to
XSL-FO or ODF as a heavier weight option, if needed. Schema annotations
are usually in my front *and* back pocket for the former. Another
article plug:
"Schema annotation for bottom-up semantic transparency"
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think32.html
> A relatively new assertion is that there is value to be gained by
> standardizing that extra semantic info and my understanding is that the
> term "microformats" has been coined to describe that design pattern.
I was actually attracted to Microformats because I thought they might
want to be solving that semantic layering issue. I was quickly
disillusioned. I think that Microformats are a sleight of hand trick to
pretend to be solving a semantic problem, when they really just re-solve
the same syntactic problem that XML already has done. All Microformats
did was emphasize anew the fact that what we really need is a revival of
Architectural Forms (as discussed elsewhere in this thread).
--
Uche Ogbuji Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net http://fourthought.com
http://copia.ogbuji.net http://4Suite.org
Articles: http://uche.ogbuji.net/tech/publications/
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