>Jon Knight writes:
> > On Fri, 6 Sep 1996, Daniel LaLiberte wrote:
> > > Rendering for humans is not the main purpose but it is a significant
> > > side benefit. The generality of the data structure is a much more
> > > important goal.
>
> > OK, so if we're talking about having a more general structure than META
> > in HTML 2.0 provides for, what was wrong with the DCES SGML DTD?
Can I seek some guidance, needed from my perspective as a chemist,
a subject that can be marked up with very fine granularity. I
posted my recent interest in metadata to a chemists forum, and one
person in particular flamed me. In a separate project, a colleague
of mine (Peter Murray-Rust) is involved in
developing an SGML dtd called CML (chemistry markup language).
The flame castigated me for not being consistent, ie in advocating a rich
chemistry dtd, so rich it appears NOT to need any metadata and
yet also proposing that chemists think about metadata in a much
less rich language such as HTML. On the face of it, we appear to
be trying to do the same thing twice.
Hence, is it true that if a particular subject has available a rich
dtd, and is prepared to solve its own robot/indexing problems,
metadata is irrelevant.
My initial feeling was that HTML is not going to go away, even
for chemists, and in fact we DO have two separate problems to
solve. But would this forum feel that metadata in HTML is
really only a recognition of the inadequacies of HTML and the
fact that HTML has evolved more and more away from marking
up content, and more into marking up style?
Henry Rzepa. +44 171 594 5774 (Office) +44 594 5804 (Fax)
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