[html4all] "Blue sky thinking" (or "Thinking out of the box")

[Jason White]

On Sun, Aug 26, 2007 at 04:37:58PM +0100, Philip TAYLOR wrote:
> 
> another "blue sky" idea struck me whilst I was mulling
> over the various ideas that WHAT WG have rejected.
> The one on which I homed in was the idea of DTD-based
> parsing.  

I would rather just make the switch to XML, which would also simplify the
parsing rules considerably.

However, I think the real solution would be to design a TeX-like (or TRoff or
Lout-like) language that would be secure, i.e., no unauthorized access to
external resources, but which would allow the behaviours associated with new
elements and attributes to be defined easily. It would then be a much more
straightforward matter to extend HTML by simply writing macros or functions in
this language, which could even be compiled for efficiency in a similar manner
to Lisp byte code, or Java.

Given a powerful enough style language, and markup conventions that referred
to the sources of the relevant scripts, it would be easy to define semantic
markup for a particular Web site, or a particular class of documents/content.

The underlying idea is to move the markup language implementation as much as
possible out of the compiled core of the user agent.