Feeler for SML (Simple Markup Language)

[Michael Champion]

----- Original Message -----
From: Don Park <donpark at docuverse.com>
To: <xml-dev at ic.ac.uk>
Sent: Thursday, November 11, 1999 8:48 AM
Subject: Feeler for SML (Simple Markup Language)


> I have been thinking that there are applications out there that
> can benefit from using XML yet do not need all of its features.

>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?

I'm interested!  I was advocating a stripped-down "minimal DOM" early last
year, and the decision was to wait until somebody defined a stripped-down
XML (which I guess was not exactly what the Canonical XML people ended up
doing).

I'd have to say that with the explosion of interest in using XML in
ultra-light clients such as cellphones and high transaction volume
server-side applications such as enterprise messaging, there *should* be a
lot of interest in defining standard subsets of XML and the various APIs
designed to maximize processing efficiency.  These are areas of obvious
interest to my employer, and I'm pretty sure I could get time authorized to
work on such a thing.

I've had some correspondence with other interested parties ... the sticking
point is where to do this?  The W3C doesn't appear to be interested ... The
Java Community Process is obviously focussed on Java, but one can easily
imagine that many "SML" processors are going to be written in C or
Assembler, so those requirements ought to be designed in from the beginning
... The IETF process (as I understand it, correct me but let's not have a
flame war if you disagree) would take too long to get such a thing out in
time to be useful in today's extremely fast-moving environment .... It might
be interesting to see if an ad-hoc group like the one that defined SAX could
do such a thing, but the xml-dev community is much larger (and probably more
unwieldy) than it was a couple of years ago ...

Any ideas?

Mike Chamion


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