Re: [xml-dev] Change the declarative markup story

["Liam R. E. Quin" <liam@fromoldbooks.org>]

On Tue, 2019-01-22 at 12:58 +1100, Rick Jelliffe wrote:

(thank for replying!)

> Isn't this just the old W3C stance that universal addressability is
> the important thing (e.g. URLs)?

Well, i don’t _think_ so, or, i don’t mean it that way.


> If information is so important, why include PDF in the list,
Because PDF documents often contain information.

>  which kinda is
> the opposite of information organized by a schema: it is a program
> organized as arbitrary functions?

That's one way to look at PDF - or PostScript for that matter - it's a
program that, when executed, produces (one expects) marks on a page.
Although i once wrote an interactive game in PostScript.

Tim Berners-Lee in his Design Documents wrote that an SVG document is a
function that, when executed, produces a drawing. However, this doesn't
seem to allow for other ways of using the XML that's the SVG document:
i can write an XSLT stylesheet that changes it into a SQL statement
that queries a database for circles of the same size. Our XML Promise,
as i call it, is that any XML processor is licensed to process any XML
document in any way. Similarly, it's OK to read a PDF document without
executing it as PostScript.

The rebranding part is that XML isn't central to this story, but is
instead a central _part_ of it.

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting.
Web slave for vintage clipart http://www.fromoldbooks.org/