[xml-h] what would you like?

[Simon St.Laurent]

nicovdwater@planet.nl (Nico van de Water) writes:
>If there is one thing I like about this new list, it is the more
>holistic (hypertext+XML) approach, rather than the isolated, separate
>XML, XSLT and XHTML forums (valuable though they probably are to the
>majority of the X world). 

I hope very strongly that this list can bring together the rather
separate communities.  I'm not expecting everyone to share the same
perspective or even agree on a big picture, but hopefully there's
benefit in the conversation.

>I do not want to sound overly negative. It is just that I am sometimes
>exhausted from ploughing through various books, with examples that
>still treat the subject matter in an isolated way.

Books on these subjects tend to cover pieces.  Most broad XML books
cover XLink and XPointer, for instance, but there isn't a lot you can
show at the moment, so they largely talk about capabilities and show
the syntax in relatively simple examples.  XHTML books may mention XLink
briefly, but there hasn't been much reason so far to do so.  (My own
XHTML book only mentions XLink as a challenge for XHTML Modularization
and in a tiny note on XLink when talking about the a element.)

>So far, it has been a bit of a struggle: the internet, forums and
>e-mail are all fine to swap ideas, but to really discuss them (or
>rather, problems and possible solutions), I prefer face-to-face
>contact. 

We now have 74 members, and hopefully some of these will prove
geographically convenient.  It would be very nice if conversation on
this list led to (friendly) face-to-face meetings.

>Would this list be open to discuss practical issues (as in "I would
>like to this and that with such and so material/contents"),

Definitely.  Dave Pawson's asked that in a general way, but there's a
lot of rich possibility there.  

>development aspects (data -> XML -> XHTML, or data -> XML ->
>database-like searching/filtering),

Certainly, as long as there's some hypertext content.

>and for example, to play devil's
>advocate here, what are content management systems, where do database
>aspects creep in, how do you go about setting up a CMS, et cetera?

Here I start to get frightened, as CMS discussions can easily become
infinite, and extremely particular to a given CMS implementation (or
even version).  General discussions of how hypertext and CMS systems fit
together makes a lot of sense, but let's try not to dive into CMS
choices or configuration that deeply.

Does that sound reasonable?
-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org