Re: LYNX-DEV XML moved to Proposed Recommendation

[David Woolley]

> should feel more than free to contact me directly.  BarryScript will
> be a good start, as the stylesheet language for XML is using
> "ECMAScript" (the standardized version of JavaScript) for its
> computational part.

My understanding is that XML says nothing at all about rendering.  E.g.
Microsoft's channel description files are XML but rendered completely
differently from a stylesheet approach.

It's true that, to the extent that you can describe HTML semantics purely
with stylesheets, you could specify rendering for XML or its parent, SGML,
with such stylesheets, but to do this with Lynx, the first stage would be
to make Lynx completely style sheet driven.  I think that is what you are
really asking for, as once everything is done with stylesheets, rendering
XML plus stylesheets is relatively trivial, but without total style
sheet control XML can only be rendered as the parse tree, or raw.

(XML is a derivative of SGML which is (more correctly "can be", but I think
we are talking the "is" case, here) self defining with regard to syntax,
but otherwise keeps most of the flexibility of SGML.  HTML is an instance
of SGML which uses a mixture of container and non-container constructs and
has optional closing tags, so can't be parsed without reference to the DTD.
It also has a lot of semantics associated with the elements, whereas XML has
very few, mainly those to do with anchor elements. 

I think the intention of XML is to move back into the actual element names
the information about the logical structure of the document that has been
pushed into class= in HTML 4.  The reason you want the logical structure
is because you want to do application processing on the document rather
than to control rendering, although it does allow an intelligent user
to apply general rendering rules, rather than decide on the physical
rendering of each component, separately.)