Re: Venting

Subject: Re: Venting
From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 11:46:04 -0500
>At 05:09 PM 2/11/99 -0500, you wrote:

>>I for one very much need to be able to use one document with different
>>style sheets to produce both a printed book and a Web site, preferably
>>automatically.  XML isn't just for the Web. Neither is XSL. Nor should
>>they be.
>
>But come on, really.  Is it the job of the W3C to recreate every creative
>formatting that was ever used in a book, when both margin notes and
>footnotes are really just plain old linked content?  Pagination, fine.  But
>marginalia?
>

Somebody has to do it. The fact is there are some technologies that are
going to be used both on the Web and off. Millions of people are thoroughly
inconvenienced by their inability to use the same tools they use for their
traditional work on the Web. Why can't Illustrator files be posted on the
Web? Why can't Microsoft Word files be posted? The answer really boils down
to problems with incompatible file formats. XML can solve that problem, but
it won't if we operate under the mistaken assumption that the Web is All
and All is the Web.


+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|        XML: Extensible Markup Language (IDG Books 1998)            |
|   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764531999/cafeaulaitA/   |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://sunsite.unc.edu/javafaq/ |
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://sunsite.unc.edu/xml/     |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+



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