xml-dev - Re: Comercial XML editor recommendations

[len bullard <cbullard@hiwaay.net>]

Michael Leventhal wrote:
> 
> I thought the perspectives were coalescing.
> Is this two editor approach a transitional stage on the way to a more
> glorious evolutionary stage or have we, in fact, distinguished different
> types of tasks to which different types of tools have been precisely tailored
> to exact nature of the task?
> 
> Michael Leventhal

Possible.  Even in the past, we have seen considerable differences 
between SGML-complete editors that were very powerful and came 
with attendant setup complexity, and editors that just let you 
point to a DTD and get a configured editing interface.

Along the way, some systems whose design parameters did not 
include the complexities of *faithful to the pica* print 
requirements have been used successfully.  At least two 
of these were based on laissez-faire (well-formed 
input/batch validation on request) systems.  These fared 
well in production environments and are still deployed.

Here is another perspective.  What if DTDs came into 
being as a result of measurement of frequency and 
occurrence rather than from design and imposition?
Note I am not talking about DTDs generated by inducing 
markup, but DTDs created as tags are generated by  
users in the course of natural tagging.  Consider 
the habits borne of the HTML users who began to 
unwittingly use content tagging styles almost as 
jokes to delineate thoughts in emails, etc.
It is interesting to speculate what the place of 
genetic DTDs such as could be created from these 
would have since in some ways the resemble a 
natural language emerging from an artificial language 
environment.

Len Bullard
Intergraph Corporation

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