Feeler for SML (Simple Markup Language)

[Betty L. Harvey]

Don:

	I think it is an interesting idea but not good for the XML
community as a whole.  XML is already very fragmented and confusing to the
'newbie'.  If you ask 10 people who have heard about XML but are not
ingrained in the XML specification - "What is XML?", I guarantee you will
get at least 8 different answers. By adding another subset and 'ML' into
the mix we will add considerable confusion. Individuals can now scale XML
down for their own purposes.  You can do the same scaling with any other
computer technology, JAVA, Perl, etc.  Use what you need.

	I have reading the threads from the last few days with interest
though. It took me a few moments this morning to realize Rick's message
this morning on XML 2.0(alpha) was a joke. In all fairness it was before
my morning coffee but I did almost have a slight coronary |-).

	Just a couple of comments on recent posts on external parsed
entities and Unique ID's:

Eliot - I never knew you thought parsed entities were 'evil'.  I knew
        you didn't particularly like them but the 'Darth Vader of XML'
	|-).  I also agree with you that the 'valueref' of HyTime would
        be extremely useful - but XLink should do the job.

Like, Ken, I have found external entities to be really useful in creating
reusable components.  However, IDs and parsed external entities have a
tendency to be problematic - even in a controlled environment.  They will
be even more problematic when we really start creating 'global' documents,
i.e., virtual catalogs.

Betty

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Betty Harvey                         | Phone: 301-540-8251 FAX: 4268
Electronic Commerce Connection, Inc. | 
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On Thu, 11 Nov 1999, Don Park wrote:

> 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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