Has Roger's Brain Been Altered?

[cbullard@hiwaay.net]

That's what you get for asking questions, Roger.  Feed back alters  
systems.  The question is your brain now well-formed or chaotic may be  
appropriate.  Global feedback to local systems is noisy.  Local  
feedback to global systems can be very useful.  Internationalization  
starts more wars than localization.

"The trouble with this kind of thinking (i.e. that we should minimize
 input/output distance in our schemas) is that it leads to conclusions that
 are unpalatable for some: in particular, if html/rss are the main output
 formats, it encourages the back propagation of html-isms.  (I was sacked
 from a job once for suggesting that extended html would suffice, in the
 90s.) The design issue gets resolves itself to 'how can we extend html with
 our more semantic markup?"  At which stage the lack of power of dtds and
 xsd, e.g to have content models keyed by attribute values rather  
than just generic identifiers, brings people to a grim stop."

Sometimes PDF is the main output format.  More and more in my work,  
that is the case.  It turns out that full-up-does-anything hypermedia  
isn't that useful Off The Web.

As I read these threads, I'm starting to love this FOSI.  Between the  
ability to extend the S1000D schemas at will and make the FOSI carry  
the water for the target format, most things "just work".  Then do the  
nasty bits (say forms) in the PDF.  It Just Works.  Will it work in  
the blind?  Heavens no.  Almost nothing does.  Some works better than  
others but by keeping the application space local and well-specified,  
some work precisely as designed.

The horrors described in these threads such as namespaces have more to  
do with trying to make one ring rule them all:  HTML and THE Web.

And lads this is like the surveillance debacle: you were warned. :)

len