"spaghetti" <spaghetti@aspyre.net> wrote:
> So basically the trend is that we don't care about all that
> understood metadata of HTML tags in favor of the flexibility of XML
> for the author?
That seems to be the trend. And some day the original idea of HTML will
be reinvented. Under some fancy name, probably.
> What about stuff like the "modular" XHTML?
Controlled confusion. The practical reason is probably that the future
development of _a_ markup language turned out to be too difficult, so
it was split into parts. Similar phenomenon has occurred in the CSS
front. Naturally there are good explanations to all this, but I think
the real explanation is that people just gave up and wishfully think
that the pieces will magically fit together.
> I guess I'm pretty stupid, but why are HTML documents that are
> written as XML considered an "application?"
There are two separate issues here. The _media type_ is classified into
major type "application" for some mystical reason - that type should be
used basically for binary formats of data, intended for processing
using specific software. So much for universality.
The other issue is that traditionally the SGML world has called
document _formats_ like HTML "applications". I guess it's just part of
the somewhat odd SGML terminology. SGML is a metanotation for defining
the syntax of various notations, so the latter could be called
"applications" of the metanotation.
--
Yucca,
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html