Feeler for SML (Simple Markup Language)

[Don Park]

Everyone,

I have been thinking that there are applications out there that
can benefit from using XML yet donot need all of its features.
The Canonical XML spec goes quite a distance in cutting away
some of the features, for different purpose, but I still feel
that more can be cut away.  Rick Jelliffe's rather funny
message along with some WebDAV papers I read over the weekend
got my mind buzzing enough for me to share this idea with the
rest of XML-DEV.

What I have in mind is a subset of XML, I'll call it Simple
(or Stupid) Markup Language (SML) for now, that simplifies XML
down to the bare essentials.  Ideally, it should also be a
subset of Canonical XML.  Here are some ideas:

o No Attributes (ouch!)
o No PI, Comments, Notations, or CDATA sections
o No document type declaration
o UTF-8 encoding only
o No non-character entity references
o No predefined character entities (I am iffy on this one)

What do you guys think?  Please do not get caught up with
the list I presented above because they are just ideas and
subject to change later depending on your capacity to scream
convincingly.  The key point to consider is whether there is
a broad enough need for such a subset of XML.

Best,

Don Park    -   mailto:donpark at docuverse.com
Docuverse   -   http://www.docuverse.com

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