Re: [xml-dev] XML vocabulary for expressing constraints?

[Steve Newcomb <srn@coolheads.com>]

On 12/16/2013 06:37 PM, Simon St.Laurent wrote:

> There is also a growing, though I think unfortunate, school of web
> application design that thinks of HTML as merely a serialization for the
> underlying DOM created and manipulated through JavaScript.

Simon, I'd be pleased to see you expand on why it's unfortunate.
Several possibilities occur to me, but it would be interesting to know
which, if any, of them you are thinking about.

I think an argument could be made in the other direction, too -- that
HTML, or any other notation, should be regarded in whatever way its
authors regarded it, because that's an attitude that's fundamentally
necessary for communication between human beings to succeed.

I usually treat HTML as slightly-defective SGML; it's an attitude that
works pretty well for me.  I must have missed the bus to the world where
there's no SGML any more; I seem to be living in a world where there's
still much more SGML than XML.   Considered in that light, the DOM is an
"SGML Application" (that phrase is HyTime jargon) whose interchange
syntaxes are described by DTDs.  As an SGML Application, the DOM seems
to me no less valid than any other.