Re: [xml-dev] A question of necessity

["sean.mcgrath@propylon.com" <sean.mcgrath@propylon.com>]

[Steve Newcomb]
>Nevertheless, there's an awful lot there that's really worthwhile and 
still timely.  HyTime still addresses problems that have only become 
more urgent with the passage of time...

I well remember being shocked at how powerful Synex Viewport - later 
known as Softquad Panorama - was, as a hypermedia browsing tool. It is a 
terrible pity that this product disappeared IMO.

Figuring out enough about HyTime AFs to get it set up on my SGML corpora 
wasn't trivial but once it was set up, it worked brilliantly and opened 
my mind in two major ways:

- All the different ways in which A can be linked to B. Directly and 
indirectly. These days, a lot of that ends up getting hard coded in Web 
apps because there are no standard ways to do it. I still find myself 
using HyTime terminology for some of them e.g. treeloc, location ladder etc.

- All the different ways a single document instance can be modeled - 
without changing the markup - by using the parser to essentially 
annotate the DAG as it is being generated. Its not a silver bullet - you 
definitely still need to do transformations in most cases - but a 
surprising number of very useful "views" over the document instance can 
be created by just using AF schema annotations.

Sean