[whatwg] Client-side includes proposal

[Elliotte Harold]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Aug 2008, Elliotte Harold wrote:
>>> In the case of non-Web content, the use of HTML is an academic point, 
>>> since any format would work as well.
>> Really? Why? and how? That's certainly not self-evident.
> 
> When you control the software used to read the data, it doesn't matter 
> what the data format is.
> 

Who says you control the software used to read the data? I often want to 
send documents around via e-mail, network mounts, ÇDs, and other 
non-network means. I usually don't care and don't want to care what 
platform or software is used to read those documents. I certainly don't 
wnt to have to supply such software to people I'm communicating with. 
HTML works very nicely for me here. Software independence is a very good 
idea, and hardly unique to the Web.

Admittedly, there have been a lot of software dependent document formats 
over the last 20-30 years. That was a mistake that hopefully we are now 
recovering from.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo at metalab.unc.edu
Refactoring HTML Just Published!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0321503635/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA