semantics vs. styles was Re: [pmwiki-users] Re: floating box on the right

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sun, Mar 27, 2005 at 12:53:45PM -0500, Radu wrote:
> The problem that many pro-standard people keep bringing up as a reason for 
> the existence of standards and against ad-hoc objects is communication:
> *without a standard, there would be no way from different systems to 
> interact;
> *having an all-encompassing standard (with all the ad-hoc objects built 
> here and there) would make the parsers very heavy and open the way for 
> conflicts (as we sometimes get when applying different recipes)

Yeah, I've heard that argument many times before from pro-standard
people, and I just don't buy it.  People who make that argument must
ignore the success of the Internet itself, in which consensus and
implementations are achieved *before* standards are defined for them,
and systems working without some pre-defined standard are still able
to interact.

And as for "heavy parsers and conflicts", I can't see that the restrictive
standard we have now has eliminated this.  An extensible web parser already
has to be able to understand and parse XML, DTDs, and CSS (each with
their own syntax and validators), and even with the restrictive standard
there are still plenty of conflicts.  

Extensibility doesn't require making a heavy parser -- it ought to have
been possible to create an extensible language within a well-defined
syntax.  Programming languages do it all the time -- i.e., creating
new functions in the language doesn't require me to rewrite the parser
or compiler.

Pm