Subject: Re: HTML is a formatting/UI language was: RE: Formatting Objects considered harmful From: Håkon Wium Lie <howcome@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 22:06:04 +0200 (MET DST) |
[Thanks for changing the subject. We're moving towards the periphery of this mailing list] Jonathan Borden wrote: > 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? Here's one example: <div class="person" xmlns="urn:hl7" UID=".." SSN="..."> <div class="n"> <span class="FirstName">John</SPAN> <span class="LastName">Smith</SPAN> </div> <div class="a" type="home"><SPAN CLASS="Address1">... ...</DIV> <span class="DOB" dt:dt="iso...">... <span class="insurance" ID="..."> <span class="business" role="Insuror">...</SPAN> ... </span> <div class="person" role="Provider">... <div class="person" role="EmergencyContact"> ... <div class="diagnosis" CPT="...">... <div class="medication" ...> I understand if you don't want to use this format internally, but when shipping across the Web, my example can be shown in 100 million browsers -- including aural ones -- yours can't. And they both contain your original semantics. You can programatically convert my document back to yours. If I had known about the semantics of your tags, I could have done a better job of converting into XHTML tags. Most likely, there are better alternatives than DIV and SPAN, but since I don't know the semantics of your DTD etc. I'm sure you see the irony :-) [The above conversion is slightly simplified. If you insist on valid documents, not only well-formed ones, you will have to add more elements to represent the non-XHTML attributes. Also, you may want to insulate the ID attribute on the "insurance" element to avoid name conflicts. The same would be the case if you happened to use an attribute named "class" in you internal DTD] > My point is that XML is compared not to HTML > rather SGML, and XHTML is merely an XML document type, hence your call to > transmit XHTML rather than 'arbitrary' XML is merely a call to perform > translation on the server rather than the client. This is wasteful of server > resources and severly limits the ability of sophisticated client side > processing. There is a small cost involved in the server-side conversion, yes. But you can still do the client side processing since all your data is still there. What you gain is accessibility. -h&kon Håkon Wium Lie http://www.operasoftware.com/people/howcome howcome@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx simply a better browser XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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