Back in the early '90s, when HTML was still an SGML application, Yuri Rubinski
(the godfather of SGML and a tireless champion of structured markup until his
untimely passing) asked myself and another colleague to demonstrate using
external text entities with HTML as a potential way to make more "dynamic" HTML
pages but of course it didn't get any traction with the browser vendors, who
barely understood that start and end tags represented complete structures... It
also required using a real SGML parser, which was a problem, a problem we
explicitly tried to address with XML ...
But that's ancient history now and if I keep this up I'll start singing Lady of
Spain and try to show you my scars....
Cheers,
E.
--
Eliot Kimber
http://contrext.com
On 2/27/19, 3:43 PM, "Wendell Piez wapiez(_at_)wendellpiez(_dot_)com"
<xsl-list-service(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com> wrote:
Hey Liam,
On Wed, Feb 27, 2019 at 12:12 AM Liam R. E. Quin
liam(_at_)fromoldbooks(_dot_)org
<xsl-list-service(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com> wrote:
> If XML had (like HTML) been without an inclusion mechanism of its own,
> solutions like XInclude woudlwould have happened sooner. The barely
> adequate discourages the excellent.
Too true. There are tradeoffs even to the tradeoffs.
> A problem with entities is that they are in the syntactic domain rather
> than representing relationships.
Indeed indeed. They stand between us and the parse.
Yet I find the same thing to be true of all these so-called static
site generators, which work entirely by tag-patching, and think we
have still not come far enough. The bad old thing keeps getting
reinvented even after we have better. It makes me sad to have
beautiful clean data coming out of my process and hear them say, do
you think we could have it in Markdown?
Cheers, Wendell
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