> > For example, this recently came up on the CSS list, when Andrew McFarland
> > pointed out that in his name the "c" in "Mc" should be superscript:
>
> So how has he survived using e-mail all these years?

Touche! I don't really have a specific must-have example of using markup
in those elements, it's more of a nagging feeling that being able to do so
presents opportunities for smart software.

However as you point out, the RDFish metadata approach also allows nesting
arbitrary markup, so it's not like such a gulf between the two approaches.

> The <subject> element may contain mixed content. However, if an application
> processing <subject> does not know how to handle contained elements, those
> elements will be ignored while the PCDATA within them will still be
> processed. The choice of which vocabulary is used within <subject> should
> take this behavior into account for greater compatibility.

Hmm, more or less, although I probably wouldn't have expressed it like
that. It's really just using XML as markup, where you care about the
*text*, rather than some hierarchical structure, and the elements and
attributes are really incidental to the text that you are presenting.

A good test for whether XML is being used as markup or for hierarchical
structure is to imagine the tags disappearing, and seeing if the resulting
text still makes sense. (XHTML is definitely on the markup side of the
spectrum, while vocabularies that store all data in attributes of empty
elements and eschew mixed content altogether are not).

Michael Day

--
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