Article on XML (and CML)

[len bullard]

Peter Murray-Rust wrote:

Mark has been worried about it for awhile.  He 
defends "TimBLs shining moment of clarity" which 
he thinks is being lost.  We sparred over this 
at VRML98.  This viewpoint does not seem to be 
rooted in sufficient depth of knowledge about 
markup technologies which can only in and of 
themselves, provide syntax unification.

OTOH, the very real problem is the tendancy of 
the markup community to want syntax unification 
at the cost of existing syntaxes for media types. 
I have myself, been a promoter of "wall to wall 
SGML" as I referred to it then.  However, there 
are obstacles that make me think it isn't wise. 
The noise being made about MS Chrome is promoting 
the usual FUD which paralyzes markets in the 
headlights.  Standard interfaces for interacting 
with non-XML media types should be on the WG 
worklist.  This is important to establishing a 
standard framework for multimedia on the web 
which is, IMO, a much more critical issue for 
creating content markets than XML.  It is also 
an issue which Microsoft cannot solve by itself 
but which must be solved in a way that enables 
all competitors to remain competitive.  

Len Bullard


> I have just posted the following message [to chemweb at ic.ac.uk]:
> >
> >Glyn Moody has written an interesting and informative article about XML for
> >the New Scientist:
> >http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980530/xml.html
> >
> >which spotlights CML among other markup languages. It is factually correct
> >(not always the case with XML articles :-( )and highlights the challenge of
> >providing universal semantics and metadata. One of the concerns (Mark
> >Pesce, VRML) is that XML could lead to 'Balkanisation'  of the Web, through
> >designers sticking to their own tags.

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