Abstract

Ted Nelson’s “Embedded Markup Considered Harmful”, an essay included in the XML edition of the World Wide Web Journal, has long been the target of potshots from developers happier about markup than Nelson. Nelson’s tone is strong and fairly bitter, but the ideas are powerful and worth considering. This presentation will explore the possibility of separating markup structures from the content they describe and the capabilities this opens. It will also explore the lessons this experiment has for developers using markup more conventionally, whether they apply their markup to data or to documents.