Divided Purpose

A List Apart published an article yesterday about the “unwebbability” of many written documents, and calls for XML to save the day.

I actually discussed that idea, albeit tangentially, in my last post about HTML5 vs XHTML2. The one thing few people emphasize anymore is that The Internet is not the same as The Web. The lingua franca of the web is HTML1 but XML is probably better for the internet at large.

The article tries to argue that HTML isn’t capable of semantically representing many formats, though the one they deconstruct in particular is the typical screenplay format2.

Most of the arguments against representing screenplays don’t hold much water to me; specifically, the idea that using class names to indicate semantic meaning is insufficient seems odd. Provided there’s an accepted microformat that people follow, class names are equivalent to xml elements in terms of semantic meaning. They are both simply tokens that indicate meaning to those accepting of those particular tokens.

But, accepting their assertion that class names are unacceptable as a retainer of semantic tokens, they fail to understand that XML does not have more inherent semantics than HTML, it only has greater extensibility of semantics.

This is a point that bears repeating, in slightly different words. An XML document has no semantic meaning without a predefined and shared document structure.

We could create an XML derivative Screenplay Markup Language (SML) but it would be utterly useless on The Web. It would be great on The Internet as an open format that could be freely exchanged, and perhaps even transformed into HTML that would mimic the visuals of the real thing, but SML would be useless on The Web.

The Internet is not for the presentation of documents, so XML is ideal. But if you want to display something on The Web, HTML is the way to go. It’s really not that complicated.

Footnotes

  1. A phrase which is mocked in the article, but is nonetheless true. [↩]
  2. Actually, they pick on John August’s Scrippets tool that allows screenplays to be easily written and displayed on blogs, which is a little harsh because it’s a great tool for people who write about screenwriting. [↩]