Re: Transformation + FOs makes abuse easy

Subject: Re: Transformation + FOs makes abuse easy
From: "Chuck White" <chuck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 19:12:46 -0700
Simon St.Laurent wrote:

>On this last point, you're right.  My concerns arise when developers
>perform the transformation end on the server and ship FOs (or
>formatting-oriented HTML) from the server to the browser in place of the
>original document and style sheet.  These cases are not a problem _if_ the
>original document (with meaningful markup) is available freely.

Håkon Wium Lie wrote:

If the original XML source is available, no semantics is lost. The
fear is that the XML source document will be withheld by the server
(for economic or other reasons) and XFO will be sent out instead.

Thanks to both Håkon and Simon for their responses. They were very helpful
in explaining their positions.

Boy, I'm sure I sound very simple, but I need to go forward anyway: XML is,
at least as I view it, a data-centric markup language. I imagine there are
numerous scenarios for which I wouldn't *want* source documents to be made
public (like your credit card information, or your address). So I don't
understand why withholding source documents is a bad thing.

Even using the CSS model alone, I'd want to keep some information secured on
the server and away from public view. If you're worried that companies will
send out only FOs and never their associated XML source docs, my real world
experience tells me that companies never take an extra step if they don't
need to. If anything, the opposite is true. Smart companies will continue to
make more and more information available, because it brings in potential
customers (or keeps current ones happy).

But again, I can't say I know for sure that I completely understand the
arguments. Simon's reference to "meaningful markup" suggests to me he is
concerned about client-side accessibility to source code, but if that's the
case, that argument ended a long time ago with stuff like ASP and other
server side processing (not that it's not a legitimate debate). Then there's
the issue of XML linking, in which you have an embedded link. If you view
the source, all you get is the link, not the document being displayed. You
have to jump through some hoops to view the source. Non-experts wouldn't
have a clue about how to do that.

At the end of the day, this debate really seems to me like a namespace
issue. Seems like I could develop my own formatting vocabulary, assign it a
namespace, cook up a processor (well, *I* can't, but maybe I could hire
someone who can), and completely ignore anything the W3C does. In fact, I
could develop any old processor that listens to my own vocabulary (maybe a
vector-based language that only one browser in the world understands).

As for the generic concern that companies will start charging for bits of
information, the Internet culture has demonstrated that there is only one
thing people will pay for over the Web, and developers for that segment of
the web are those whose sense of style is not worth addressing.

Chuck White
Creative Director
Advance Recruitment Advertising, Inc.
visit our online job site:
http://www.bajobs.com


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