[sc34wg3] Almost arbitrary markup in resourceData

[Murray Altheim]

Murray Altheim wrote:
> Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
> [...]
> 
>>What the standard will say very clearly is that XTM processors are
>>expected to take this additional markup and store it, without making
>>any attempt to interpret it in any way. It just goes into the data
>>model instance that is built, and is stored there. 
[...]

Point is, arbitrary markup is a killer for interchange, whether you
demand that processors "store" or process it. And storing it means
that you're permitting applications to process it, and applications
will then begin the *wonderful* competition to see who can out-customize
an interchange syntax. All that's happened is that you've moved the
customization up a level, from the processor to the application.

Rather than doing something so odd as that, have you considered what
the actual use cases are? If 90% of them are to just have XHTML markup,
I have made an offer to Jim to create an XHTML+XTM DTD, which would
allow people to inline formatting, links, etc. and we could talk
somebody into writing an XSLT stylesheet to strip that for transformation
to XTM 1.0, i.e., clean XTM. If ISO wanted to standardize XHTML+XTM,
fine, but this wouldn't corrupt the use of XTM itself as an interchange,
and there'd be only *two* targets for support, rather than the complete
impossibility of correctly supporting markup soup.

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim                         http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK                    .

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