Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: T. Nelson -- Doesn't understand XML?

Author:Dennis Peterson
Posted:11/10/1999; 8:03:08 AM
Topic:T. Nelson Critique of Embedded Markup
Msg #:12918 (In response to 12880)
Prev/Next:12917 / 12919

I think there is a fundamental flaw in the idea of parallel markup, the idea that all your markup tags should be separate from the text itself, so you can switch them around. From Nelson's perspective, it's great, because he's thinking of everything as text. It's perfectly fine to switch around the emphasis tags, or make some sentences into subheads, whatever. But Nelson argues that XML is flawed because the markup is embedded. He's completely missing the point of XML, which is that the markup denotes meaning. If I have an XML tag for Price, it makes no sense for you to remove that tag and replace it with Weight. Swapping XML tags would be like doing random typecasts.

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