Dear Mr. Marcus Reichardt, I first wisth to state that I found the
reply interesting even while I do not agree with everything, Being
too busy right now, I will likely post a detailed point-by-point
reply sometime between a week and two from now. In the meanwhile, I
wish to encourage you to also send your reply to the other addresses
to which my original message was sent. I don't want to force it upon
you as as such I have not done so myself, however believe that the
discussion may be of high interest to some of them. I need to specify
that Liam Quin's address has changed to liam at fromoldbooks dot org.
I am glad that a discussion on these more than serious issues seems
to have begon.
Raphaël Hendricks
Le 21-01-04 à 09:10, Marcus Reichardt a écrit :
> Dear Raphael,
>
> I appreciate your attempt to bring back some life to this list. Let me
> start by giving an alternate view of the last one-and-half decade's
> developments on the web:
>
> WHATWG formed as a consortium to propose new features for web
> browsers, and there's nothing wrong with that; expecially since W3C's
> XHTML 2 (XForms and co) had no chance of ever becoming part of
> browsers. Regarding the leap to defining a "standard", however, I
> fully agree with your notion that there's a distinction to be made
> between an app platform (that nobody called for, and only browser
> vendors had a vetted interest in building) and a document format used
> as a primary means for communication in politics, law, education,
> medical, personal, etc, etc. Let me put it this (somewhat
> grandstanding) way: the idea that a self-proclaimed "standardization
> body" can usurp and proclaim ownership of the way humanity communicate
> digitally is ... odd.
>
> I don't agree with your criticism of Ian Hickson's work. AFAICS (and
> I've probably studied HTML 5 in detail more than most people [1]) he
> made a very good job of capturing HTML 4 rules, and added a couple of
> not-too-controversial elements on his own. Where it's gone wrong is
> that the syntax presentation for HTML 5 (as opposed to the historical
> HTML 4 DTD) doesn't convey its basic construction as a span-level
> markup vocabulary extended with block-level elements. You can see this
> with the definition of the paragraph ("p") element which includes an
> enumeration of paragraph-terminating elements rather than referring to
> the category of block-only elements. Consequently, when new elements
> where added, the spec authors "forgot" to include elements into the
> enumerated list of p-terminating elements, making the spec bogus. In
> other words, the HTML 5.1 spec process lost control over their
> workflow, and didn't want to employ SGML or other formal markup tech
> to quality-assure their work either, which easily would have (and has
> [1]) spotted these flaws.
>
> In this context, let me also say that the notion of "tag soup" markup
> is a myth. All versions of HTML, including HTML 5.x, can be parsed by
> SGML using well-known, formal rules for tag minimization/inference and
> other shortform syntax (save for the definition of the "script" and
> "style" elements which were bogusly introduced into HTML such that
> they would be treated as comments by legacy browsers). It's odd that
> XML heads (sorry) refuse to acknowledge and apply document engineering
> practices known since the 1980's or earlier when these techniques are
> discussed to great length on this very xml-dev mailing list (in
> 1996/97). SGML has additional concepts on top of XML very relevant
> today, such as custom Wiki syntaxes (lots of tech content is written
> using markdown today), type-safe/injection-free HTML-aware templating,
> etc. And SGML also offers a formal way to integrate HTML content into
> "canonical" markup (ie XML) [3].
>
>> XML-based standards from OASIS, such as Docbook
>
> Just fyi, Docbook was as an SGML-based vocabulary most of the time;
> it's only since version 5 that dedicated SGML-based formulations have
> been dropped from the spec (since XML is just a subset of SGML
> anyway). I agree though OASIS (fka SGML/Open group) has put out useful
> standards, and is an org I'd love to see helping to bring our
> stagnation to an end.
>
>> replace the current selectors with XPath based selectors [...] the
>> inconvenient (sic) of not being fully XML/XPath based [...] XML
>> reformulation of [...] CSS3
>
> I can only recommend to look, once in a while, at techniques outside
> the XML-centric world.
>
>> Python, [...], Ruby, [...], ISLisp [...]
>
> I'm sorry but this merely reads as a list of personal preferences.
> There's nothing wrong with JavaScript; it's a language ultimately
> derived from an awk-like syntax (so is very adequate for text
> processing even though shortforms for pattern matching didn't make it
> into the language), and is probably the most portable language out
> there today.
>
>> the language Mercury
>
> Mercury is a fine statically-typed, restricted variant of Prolog, and
> even used as implementation language for Prince XML, but if you want
> to push for logical programming on document data, I'd recommend to
> stick to ISO Prolog which has many, many implementations. In fact,
> basic Prolog (on a suitable term representation for documents) can be
> used to implement a large subset of CSS selectors *and*
> layout/rendering algorithms using constraint-based formulations. Its
> role could be to give an executable/formal spec for CSS, just like it
> has been used for giving an executable spec for XML Schema by one of
> the editors of the XML Schema spec (ie. by C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
> [2]).
>
>> DRM is fundamentally wrong and constitutes a stupid and useless idea
>
> I don't like DRM either, but just as with RDF, the question is how to
> finance content creation when the only or primary income is ads rather
> than public funding. It's all too well-known that monopolization and
> platform economy is what's happening in eg. the music "industry".
>
>> May XML live-on till the end of times
>
> I have no doubt that XML will live and prosper, but my point is that
> XML is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The "end" towards
> which markup should strive is to give a reasonable, canonical way for
> editing, publishing, and preserving rich text for a layman (or
> realistically, a power user) on the web and elsewhere. Ask yourself
> what practical, real-world solutions are there left today based on XML
> for this purpose that could challenge eg. WordPress?
>
> Let me close by listing a couple of practical initiatives for bringing
> us closer to that goal, rather than going all-in on an overreaching,
> XML-centric roadmap that we've already seen failing on the web:
>
> - register a new application/html (as opposed to text/html) IANA MIME
> type for web apps such that pure markup sites not relying on
> JavaScript can be found easily and preferably over script-heavy sites;
> over time, make it bad form and penalize accordingly to serve
> script-heavy sites as text/html
>
> - question the pay-as-you-go status of W3C spec work, and push for
> public funding of HTML standardization (it's been a while that W3C has
> published an HTML spec; their HTML page just links to the WHATWG HTML
> "standard" HEAD on github)
>
> - work towards identifying a reasonable set of expected visual idioms
> on the modern web (such as menus and other generic controls) for which
> we want to have a declarative/markup-based rather than (or in addition
> to) a programmatic implementation
>
> - push/finance W3C or other body to publish formal specs for CSS
> (which is where a lot of complexity sits in today's web); try and
> define reasonable CSS subsets for document-oriented use cases; try and
> establish forward-compatible CSS versions/levels a site can anounce
> such that we can eventually see new browsers being developed
>
> - for the same reason, push for proper *versioned* HTML spec documents
> rather than "living standards" (an oxymoron in more than one way).
>
> Maybe the community is welcoming to such efforts. I think that last
> decade's SiliCon-dominated scene has definitely lost its appeal, and
> there's a growing concern towards monopolies, platforms, and verticals
> and the attention economy in general.
>
> Best regards,
> M. Reichardt
> sgmljs.net
>
>
> [1]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/html5.html
>
> [2]: http://cmsmcq.com/2004/podcg.html
>
> [3]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/sgml-html-tutorial.html
