Re: HTML is a formatting/UI language was: RE: Formatting Objects considered harmful

Subject: Re: HTML is a formatting/UI language was: RE: Formatting Objects considered harmful
From: Sara Mitchell <smitchel@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 11:18:05 -0700
Bravo! And thank you for giving a great example of why XHTML
cannot 
possibly work as a downtranslation that doesn't lose any of the 
semantics. The whole reason that XML is needed <em>in arbitrary 
incarnations<em> is that HTML (in any incarnation) cannot
possibly be extended to adequately cover the semantic needs of
every piece of information. 

Jonathan Borden wrote:
[snip]
> 
> Håkon Wium Lie wrote:
> 
> >
> > One solution which captures both is to downtranslate your internal XML
> > to XHTML while retaining the original element types in the CLASS
> > attribute:
> >
> >  <p class="question">How come?</p>
> >  <p class="answer>Because.</p>
> >
>         I have been developing a Web based electronic medical records/workflow
> system. Here is an example document fragment:
> 
> <person xmlns="urn:hl7" UID=".." SSN="...">
>         <n>
>            <FirstName>John</FirstName>
>            <LastName>Smith</LastName>
>         </n>
>         <a type="home"><Address1>... ...</a>
>         <DOB dt:dt="iso...">...
>         <insurance ID="...">
>                 <business role="Insuror">...</business>
>                 ...
>         </insurance>
>         <person role="Provider">...
>         <person role="EmergencyContact"> ...
>         <diagnosis CPT="...">...
>         <medication ...>
> 
>         How would you render this in HTML+CSS, and maintain the 'semantic' content?
> 
>         My application downloads such documents and maintains them internally, and
> they are rendered as HTML with multiple views (e.g. 1 download may produce
> 10 screens). Some of these views are forms which are used to edit and
> otherwise process the document. Element reordering and other graph
> transformations are the norm rather than the exception. The client
> application is a browser + Javascript + XSL. Where is the semantic
> 'knowledge' maintained? In the browser (it knows *nothing* about the HL7
> namespace). In the Javascript? It also knows *nothing* about the HL7
> namespace. The 'semantic knowledge' hence must be contained within the XSL
> stylesheets. How does XHTML help here? Are you suggesting that this can all
> be accomplished with <P CLASS="X"> tags?
>


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