SGML, XML and SML

[Rick Jelliffe]

 From: Don Park <donpark at docuverse.com>

 >
>FYI, SML does not have the three problems.  It is just hairless XML.

Well, it is not XML at all if  it miss-parses a well-formed XML
document.

<a>
    <?b </a> ?>
    <!-- </a> -->
    <![CDATA[ </a> ]]]>
</a>

If you go ahead with SML, you should at least use different delimiters
to make sure that there is no confusion.

And you will immediately find that your co developers will say
"end tags take up so much space".  In XML, we can say "oh, but
when they are compressed, having explicit end-tags does not take
up extra space; besides we want them for error checking and to
make life simpler for people parsing using PERL and regular
expressions".

But you cannot answer that, because your toaster has too little space to
fit an XML parser, so it cannot fit a compression utility (or TCP/IP
anyway,
as I mentioned), so the resulting design will be some single character
delimiter.  So the resulting language will look something like SGML
NET-tags:
    <a/hellow world/
or LISP:
    (a  "hello world")
or RTF:
    {a hello world}


Rick Jelliffe




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