XML complexity, namespaces (was WG)

[Simon St.Laurent]

At 02:46 PM 3/19/99 -0600, Paul Prescod wrote:
>In other words, XML is as asymmetric as SGML. Actually neither is really
>very asymmetric because you can't (well, shouldn't) get data into them
>before you have designed your document type. So input and output are both
>pretty difficult if you compare them, say, to Microsoft Word which is
>usually the benchmark people use to demonstrate how hard SGML systems are
>to build.

Ah, but if MS Word had a simple "Save-To-XML" option that let users save
their documents using markup based on the styles they've built.  Three
times now, I've seen organizations that had done a lot of very good
informal work with Word styles, and no easy path for those structures or
the documents that use them to move to XML.  I guess the incentive just
isn't there for MS to make life easy.  There are tools to do it, but it's
still not much fun.  (Another painful case of asymmetry.)

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

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