>I certainly agree with your goal, but I don't agree with the means.
>The experience I have is that standards do not work well in this area.
>What we need is an approach that allows the cross-comparison that you
>want, and yet allows for differentiation, experimentation, and
>evolution.
Perhaps the standards could describe architectural forms which would be the
basis for more individual DTDs created by each vendor. This allows searches
to be done for anything in the architectural forms, but still allows each
vendor to have additional information. Because each vendor has a DTD,
documents can still be validated when they are authored, even though they
have vendor-specific information. Because the DTDs are based on common
architectures, searches can be done across vendors.
Jonathan
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Jonathan Robie jwrobie@mindspring.com http://www.mindspring.com/~jwrobie
POET Software, 3207 Gibson Road, Durham, N.C., 27703 http://www.poet.com
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