--- Wendell Piez <wapiez(_at_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com> wrote:
I have sometimes expressed a concern about the
"gravitational pull" exerted
by particular shared processing applications on
tagging practice within a
community.
Such as an XSL stylesheet suite -- and
the better it is
designed, the worse becomes the problem.
Not
knowing any better, projects tend to code to the
stylesheet (the way newbie
web designers code to a particular browser), not to
the information they
are tagging, with the result that information reuse
and repurposing -- that
is, any application but that particular stylesheet's
target -- are
compromised, and much of the promise of XML tagging
in the first place is
betrayed. (The XML becomes a handmaiden of the
output format, rather than
the output format serving the data.)
IMHO, if someone is coding to the stylesheet rather
than to the semantics, that is a sign that either the
available semantics aren't rich enough (as is arguably
the case with HTML) or that the someone in question
doesn't really understand what they are supposed to be
doing.
That said, that is probably a more of a "religious" or
"philosophical" question than is really fit for this
list.
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