Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful

Subject: Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful
From: Guy_Murphy@xxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 17:40:35 +0100
Hi Simon.

You point is well made, however....

What the end user is getting is a view of the data. They get that either
for free, or by paying for it.

If they hit "view source" what they are now after is the semantic, which
again they get either free or by paying for it. If the intent is to give
them this for free, then give them semanticaly meaningful formating, maybe
XML+CSS. In such a case you might concentrate well on exactly what semantic
you are giving them here as opposed to the semantic used within the
application domain.

If the semantics used are not free, then using FOs gives a company a safe
wall here, a semantic firewall if you like.

In many cases, it simply will not be relevent. And the end user will not
care. All they will care about is what's infront of their eyes.

I can only speak from my own expereince, and at Dialog a large part of what
the punter is maying for are Dialogs "semantics" and paying big, seperate
and apart from any view of data purchased.

I mentioned it once before, but it warrants mentioning again within this
context, that publishing of XML on the Net, along with easy transformation
making data theft untraceable makes corporate data *very* vulnerable on the
Net to being syphoned off and repackaged. Unless you can provide companies
with at least the method of keeping hold safely of they semantic
organisation and management of data (the things that allow them competitive
advantage in accruing data), *their data will not go on the Net*.

It may interest you to know that Dialog is the worlds largest online
information provider. Certainly the marketing doctors claim it possesses
*many* times more data that the Net (::shrug:: I wouldn't know, but it's a
rediculaoously large amount). Unless it is safe to do so, my *guess* is you
will never see a fraction of that data on the Net. There is the misguided
notion that the Net is all encompassing... *there is more data off the Net
than on the Net*... I would personaly like to see more data go on the Net.

I would say that the Net *is* balkanized at the moment, in that it isn't
getting the high quality structured data. I would like to see that changed.

*All* these comments are purely my own speculative opinion, and in no way
constitute the position of The Dialog Corporation, either in whole or in
part.

Cheers
     Guy.






xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on 04/22/99 07:41:25 PM

To:   xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
cc:    (bcc: Guy Murphy/UK/MAID)
Subject:  Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful




At 12:35 AM 4/19/99 +0200, H?kon Wium Lie wrote:
>> > - XFO documents don't contain the semantics of the XML/XTL source
>
>For many, this is a feature. "Don't tell them what internal formats we
>use!" "Let them pay for semantics, if they want it!" "Hey, it looks
>fine to me!"
Thus we lose most of the benefits XML offers to the Web - searchability,
reuse, free exchange of information.
And since there is a 'legitimate' business need to be served here - a way
to have an XML site and make a profit off those who want enhanced features
- I'm sure we're going to see this happening a _lot_, if FO's are supported
widely.
It's ironic that FO's - a single vocabulary for presentation - have more
potential (in my opinion, anyway) for 'balkanizing' the Web than raw XML's
many voices.
Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

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