Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful

Subject: Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful
From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 00:10:36 -0400
At 09:38 PM 4/28/99 -0500, Paul Prescod wrote:
>The W3C creates technologies to *enable* more exciting, powerful uses of
>the Web. They cannot *require* that people use their technologies or use
>them properly.

Certainly.  But creating follow-up technologies (XSL) that largely negate
the benefits of key technologies (XML) doesn't seem too smart.

>What that means is that forcing (even by law!) corporations to expose
>their internal data would not move us toward a semantically searchable web
>unless those corporations or some third party went through aa complex
>process of structure-mapping. In other words, the semantic web can only be
>built if corporations choose to build business models that support it. It
>doesn't happen just by exposing the underlying data.

Ah, but it might have happened if we'd stuck to the earlier Web model of
annotation-based styles, rather than giving businesses an immediate out
through XSL and FOs.

The semantic Web could have been interesting, especially for search engines
and agents.  Instead, I think XML on the Web is doomed to staying in the
same place it was with HTML.  Two steps forward, one step back.  On the
bright side, XML is finding lots of use in other places for genuine
interchange of meaningful information, so it's still a step forward.

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com


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