A Line in the Declarative Syntax Sand(Was: XML complexity, namespaces (was WG))

[Rick Jelliffe]

From: David Megginson <david at megginson.com>

>What I did say is that there's not a practical difference among the
>different alternatives in XML and SGML for expressing this
>information, and probably not enough to justify the parallel
>maintenance of the two as discrete standards.

I don't agree because

1) XML is not a standard, because W3C is not an open process
but a friendly conspiracy of vendors and boffins who must kowtow
to Microsoft and TBL (not to say that these are not excellent
activities).

2) XML and SGML have fundamentally different application areas driving
them:

* SGML is a compiler compiler where the central technical question is
"people want markup in lots of different formats; how can we make a
parser
to detect the structure in as many of their formats as possible?" If you
have
shortrefs you must have maps and you must have entities and you must
have
minimization: they are justifiable because SGML is a parser technologym
not
an information-modeling technology.

* XML just expands the butt of SGML: the fact that there are tree/graph
structures
in marked-up data. Now, I admit that butt-expansion is a natural
function of
time: SGML's default delimiters (as used in HTML and SGML at many
companies)
are now familiar enough that there is also a question "people want
markup in
SGML-delimiter format: how can we make a (simple) parser that detects
the
structure in just that?"

Rick Jelliffe


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