Feeling good about SML

[Rick Jelliffe]

From: Michael Champion <Mike.Champion at softwareag-usa.com>

>Does
>footprint and processing speed matter in a world that will (some
assert)
>soon have cell phones with as much processing power as a 1994-vintage
PC?  I
>don't know, but it seems like a very worthwhile discussion to me!

And there is the question of how can a toaster have enough grunt to
handle TCP/IP enough to connect to the WWW yet be so short of space that
it cannot squeeze a little XML parser in :-)  If SML is not intended for
web use, then I think it should  be discussed in comp.text.sgml or
comp.text.

The reason SGML has so many optional features is because there were so
many people who just *had to have* something to make their life simpler.
Everytime someone says "I don't like PIs" or "I don't like DTDs" or "I
don't like external entities" or "I don't like non-ASCII" it raises the
largely bogus spectre of XML 1.1 or XML 2,0 or whatever.  It would be a
sad day to see the SGML declaration reappear as XFM. I

Everything that anyone is saying now has been said before when XML was
designed, and indeed a lot of it was apparantly said when SGML was
designed.  Of course over time the tradeoffs  differ, in partiular with
new media.

But why this endless "not invented here" desire to reinvent XML. It is
still a mystery too me.  The complication in the XML world is not XML
1.0, but namespaces (which means that an element names may mean
different things in different contexts) and class-based schemas (which
can mean that even within a namespace a name may mean different things
depending on context).  Anyone who thought DTDs were hard may be in for
a shock unless we are careful!

Rick Jelliffe



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