Eric Armstrong:
> IMPACT
> ------
> The impact of the issues go well beyond simple aesthetics,
> however. At the moment, the world's data is divided into
> several format categories:
> * easily viewed and edited plain text
> * hard to view (proprietary) structured formats
> * very hard to view binary formats
XML makes another category:
* easily viewed and hard to edit (proprietary) structured formats
I don't think that a "generalized" XML tree structure editor is very useful,
apart from doing low-level work (i.e. an "XML debugger" for well-known XML
DTDs). Inline display of tags, to me, looks rather specific to applications
of XML to traditional text mark-up. But what about Scalable Vector Graphics
(SVG), which is also based on XML? Does it really matter whether you edit
SVG tags inline or in a tree structure?
I think that every class of XML data formats needs a specialized editor, and
specialized import and export conversion filters. (After all, I *do* prefer
a text editor that displays text in italics to one that displays only the
mark-up, even if the mark-up is displayed inline.)
But what XML is currently missing, apart from a more expressive (schema)
syntax for DTDs, is a formalism for encapsulation (aka "XML-MIME"). It
should become possible to embed e.g. SVG in a text document, in a way that
can easily be detected and handled (and verified) automatically by an
(intelligent) document editor. Then, if all else fails, an editor can
implement tree-structure editing for all parts of the data that it doesn't
know, and implement a more WYSIWYG-like editing for "well-known" data
formats. I believe this to be another missing link for Berners-Lee words at
a WWW conference:
"You need to build a system that is future-proof; it's no good just making
a modular system. You need to realize that your system is just going to be
a module in some bigger system to come, and so you have to be part of
something else, and it's a bit of a way of life."
By the way, this also appears to call for more advanced DTD/schema
versioning.
Yours,
Markus.
-- Markus Fleck * GNU GLUE Groupware Project * http://glue.sourceforge.net------------------------------------------------------------------------ Attention online shoppers: Join beMANY! via the web and you'll start SAVING on all your long distance bills TODAY. Click for more! http://click.egroups.com/1/6594/5/_/444287/_/964259388/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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