What a tangled web!!! XML and related specs

[Serrat Jaime - jasr]

David,

Thanks for your prompt and useful reply.  At the risk of changing from
'newbie' to 'PEST', how about a follow-up question?

I will ignore Notes, as you suggest since I am NOT doing cutting edge stuff,
and SAX (I don't need event-based processing).  I do, however, want to
exchange metadata, so in addition to the base XML spec, it appears that I
need to be familiar with Namespaces, DOM level 1 (which apparently does NOT
support Namespaces; coming in DOM 2, maybe?) and RDF.  If that's right, it's
a reasonable enough roadmap for the time being.

But I'm still left wondering about the schema related proposals.  NOTE or
not, no pun, did the SOX submitters intend it to supercede DTD?  Was RDF
(and DCD?) meant to *extend* DTD?  I guess I'm wondering about the
*direction* of the schema proposals, without fully understanding the details
in them, nor the players involved.

-- jaime "jim" serrat

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> -----Original Message-----
> From:	David Megginson [SMTP:david at megginson.com]
> Sent:	Monday, March 15, 1999 3:01 PM
> To:	Xml-Dev (E-mail)
> Subject:	What a tangled web!!! XML and related specs
> 
> Serrat Jaime - jasr writes:
> 
>  > As a relative newbie to XML, I've been wading through the XML 1.0
>  > spec and related documents (notes, recommendations, etc.), mostly
>  > at the W3C site.  Boy, am I confused!
> 
> Take it slow.  Like IP, XML is fairly simple; like IP, XML has a lot
> of other stuff built on top of it that you can use if and only if you
> want to.
> 
> Oh, yeah -- please ignore the notes unless you're doing cutting-edge,
> speculative research.
> 
>  > I'm not only confused by the specific detail contents of the
>  > respective documents, but perhaps more importantly, by the
>  > *relationship* of the various docs to the others.  Does RDF extend
>  > or replace DTD as specified in XML 1.0?
> 
> RDF is an XML-based format for a specific domain, metadata exchange.
> It often makes sense for specific domains to have their own schema
> formats, since an XML 1.0 DTD covers only basic structure and does so
> in a very generic and low-level way.
> 
>  > Is SOX an alternative to both DTD and RDF?  What about Namespace
>  > and DCD? 
> 
> SOX is just a note right now, and a member submission at that --
> unless you're doing cutting-edge experimental research or planning to
> write your own spec, it's best to ignore member submissions and wait
> for actual recommendations.  Everyone is sending in XML-related
> submissions these days, and most of them will die unimplemented (I
> make no specific comment on SOX, positive or negative, but simply on
> member submissions in general).
> 
>  > For that matter, what about the recent XML Schema Requirements
>  > Note?  I guess I'm hoping someone will provide a spec roadmap.
> 
> Only for the XML Schema work itself.
> 
> Here's what you really have to know:
> 
> 1. XML 1.0
> 
> 2. Namespaces in XML, because it is used as a foundation by several
>    other specs like RDF and XSL.
> 
> Here's what you might want to learn, depending on your requirements:
> 
> 3. Document Object Model (DOM level one core), if you need a
>    tree-based programming API for XML.
> 
> 4. Simple API for XML (SAX 1.0, non-W3C), if you need an event-based
>    programming API for XML.
> 
> 5. RDF, if you need to exchange metadata.
> 
> Feel free to ignore everything else for now -- work on things like XSL
> or XPointer is promising, but it's still far from the stable
> recommendation stage, and in general lacks production-quality tool
> support (so does RDF, mostly, but that's another sad story).  Other
> specs cover specific document types, like XHTML, and you can ignore
> those unless you need them.
> 
> 
> All the best,
> 
> 
> David
> 
> -- 
> David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
>            http://www.megginson.com/
> 
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