THE XML REVOLUTION - TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE FUTURE WEB

Structuring general information

Consider the following recipe collection published in HTML:

<h1>Rhubarb Cobbler</h1> <h2>Maggie.Herrick@bbs.mhv.net</h2> <h3>Wed, 14 Jun 95</h3> Rhubarb Cobbler made with bananas as the main sweetener. It was delicious. Basicly it was <table> <tr><td> 2 1/2 cups <td> diced rhubarb (blanched with boiling water, drain) <tr><td> 2 tablespoons <td> sugar <tr><td> 2 <td> fairly ripe bananas sliced 1/4" round <tr><td> 1/4 teaspoon <td> cinnamon <tr><td> dash of <td> nutmeg </table> Combine all and use as cobbler, pie, or crisp. Related recipes: <a href="#GardenQuiche">Garden Quiche</a>

There are many problems with this approach to using HTML:

the semantics is encoded into text formatting tags
there is no means of checking that a recipe is encoded correctly
it is difficult to change the layout of recipes (CSS is not enough)

It would be much better to invent a special "recipe markup language"...