coming clean with the SGML crowd (was re: namespaces)

[Tyler Baker]

Tim Bray wrote:

> At 06:32 PM 9/10/98 -0400, Richard L. Goerwitz III wrote:
>
> >It's unbelievable, but people are already talking about legacy XML and
> >about the abandonment of SGML.  Is it any wonder that vendors like Micro-
> >soft seem to be sitting on the fence?  We have some people who declare
> >firmly that DTDs are the only accepted schema/validation mechanism.  And
> >we have other louder, stronger voices who are already declaring them dead.
>
> I'd like to disagree with the perception that people are not in favor of
> validation.  Early users of XML, it seems, typically want *more* validation
> than SGML offers, rather than less.  That's why there's so much energy going
> into the early stages of the new-schema design.  Yes, we need DTDs, but also,
> we need more, and we need it PDQ.  -Tim

Much to my surprise, validation in XML can be implemented a lot cheaper than I
had originally thought.  My initial guess was that validation would slow things
down 2x-3x, but actually I am only finding that validation incurs about a 20%-30%
penalty and much of that is actually spent on opening and closing the file with
the DTD.  In this case, it really does not make sense why anyone would not want
validation since it is relatively cheap.  I guess there are other reasons why
people would not want validation, but from a performance perspective my small
experience with this issue makes it a non-issue.

Tyler


xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)