Embedded Markup Considered Harmful
SGML advocates I have talked to appear to have the belief that everything is either sequential and hierarchical, or can be represented that way. What is not expresssible sequentially and hierarchically is deemed to be nonexistent, inconceivable, evil, or mistaken.
.. I believe that embedded structure, enforcing sequence and hierarchy, limits the kinds of structure that can be expressed. The question we must ask is: What is the real structure of a thing or a document? (And does it reasonably fit the allowed spectrum of variation within the notational system?)
.. My principal long-term concern is the exact representation of human thought, especially that thought put into words and writing. But the sequentiality of words and old-fashioned writing have until now compromised that representation, requiring authors to force sequence on their material, and curtail its interconnections. Designing editorial systems for exact and deep representation is therefore my objective.
.. I believe we should find a very general representational system, a reference model which breaks apart in parallel what is represented by SGML and HTML. This would make the creation of deep editing and version management methods much easier.
.. Few understand the true nature of hypertext and its relation to thought, let alone the vast interconnection of ideas, and the way that most expressions of ideas sever and misrepresent them. Today’s popular but trivially-structured Web hypertext has excused people from seeing the real hypertext issues, or being able to create and publish deep complexes of thought.