|
i also liked the example of XLink. personally, i think that one of the reasons why XLink failed is what could be called "markup-centric thinking". markup is good, but i think it should *not* be all that you are doing. do a model, and then map it to markup. markup is good, but models are reusable, so if someone else decides that the model is useful, but that the markup is not good, at least on the model level people can still align what they are doing. xml technologies don't give us any support for this kind of model reuse, but this does not mean that would not be a better way of doing things.
i proposed this for XLink (http://dret.net/netdret/publications#wil02i), but when discussing it in forums, it very quickly became clear that most people think that all that matters is markup: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200208/msg01196.html
i think that even though markup is good and great and everything, there is more to markup than just the names of things being used there, and failure to separate the two thing carefully (the model and its embodiment in a certain vocabulary) is not a good idea. this will probably infuriate the markup purists, but i think there are just too many examples for problems caused by this.
by being more careful in separating models and markup, things like HLink (anyone remembering this?) and similar monstrosities could have been avoided, and it would have been possible to re-use a very useful set of semantics.
only because namespaces are complicated and because xml technologies do not support us in separating models and markup, does not mean that we should not be good engineers and make this separation.
|
Previous Message
