=============== XML text markup =============== One of those ideas that come relatively "out of the blue." We have been `thinking about how to represent styled text in XML in RDF`__. XHTML seemed like a first possibility. Here's something that goes far beyond, in a sense. __ ../../pegboard/markup_xhtmlmodules--tjl/peg.gen.html We want to allow for "semantic markup:" markup that says what the author *means*. WYGIWYM-- what you get is what you mean. However, we don't want that *only*. We also want presentational markup, because people will want to use it, and if there is no other way they will do presentational markup through semantic markup-- they'll "emphasize" whenever they want to italicize, just to get the effect they want. This is a really bad thing. Semantic markup should be extensible; you should be able to make up new, meaningful 'styles' as you go. Here's an example from Tim Bray (source__):: The essays found on the web at
http://www.tbray.org
are boring pedantic ravings clumsily authored by a self-styled technologist.
__ http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/04/09/SemanticMarkup He says he made the namespace up when he typed the above. (It's for example purposes.) Now, that got me thinking. I propose that the above could be written pretty much like that in our system:: The essays found on the web at
http://www.tbray.org
are boring pedantic ravings clumsily authored by a self-styled technologist.
This is, admittedly, clunkier, but it would be auto-generated by the computer. -- Hmm. No, probably it would be better to explicitly declare the type of each tag somewhere; so, ok, something like this:: The essays found on the web at
http://www.tbray.org
are boring pedantic ravings clumsily authored by a self-styled technologist.
(Assume the namespace to be as in the previous example.) Like that, this would be feasible to write by hand. I like it. *Now*, every tag declared through ``tags:paragraph-tag`` or ``tags:span-tag`` would have a URI formed in the usual RDF way:: chunk = http://example.org/namespace/22#chunk address = http://example.org/namespace/22#address adj = http://example.org/namespace/22#adj adverb = http://example.org/namespace/22#adverb And *then*, you could both use this with an XSLT or CSS style sheet, and with a style definition connected to the URI through RDF. We would normally use the latter. For presentational markup, we'd use something straight-forward, like:: ... The semantic markup with special tags, as shown above, should only be done at explicit user request. If we only need to associate some text with a URI to connect it to something, we'd do:: The point of all this is: If a user consciously uses the semantic markup technology and user interface, they *create a new XML vocabulary*. A user in the know could also trivially use an existing vocabulary, like XHTML or DocBook. The result will be XML markup as you expect good XML markup to be. A great win. \- Benja