xml-dev - Re: Oedipus XML (TIe Your Mother Down)

[len bullard <cbullard@hiwaay.net>]

David Megginson wrote:
> 
> Speaking as both a parser writer and an application writer, I am
> confortable writing that XML is significantly simpler to support in
> enterprise-level implementations than full SGML, and that I have not
> actually yet really missed any of the SGML features excluded from
> XML.

I agree with this.  As an application writer who only has to parse 
parts of it and then in the context of using a relational system 
with XML editing, it looks very much the same to me as the simple 
features of SGML that I've always used.  In effect, much of the 
nastier bits of SGML I did not use before.  So, it looks much 
the same.  It is a lot of fun to tie the treeviews, browser 
objects, tables, dialogs, combo boxes, etc. together into a 
generalized knowledge management system.  Cheap too.  ;-)

> To be fair, I am talking only about the core specs -- I am comparing
> ISO 8879 to the XML 1.0 REC, and am leaving out the peripheral
> standards on both sides.  A comparison of HyTime to XLink, XPointer,
> and Namespaces, of DSSSL to XSL, or of Topic Maps to RDF would be an
> interesting but separate exercise.

Here I don't disagree, but in my work, the concepts of HyTime, DSSSL, 
the RDF Dublin Core, and namespaces influence my work.  Learning to 
think beyond the DTD to the information properties of the metalanguage 
proves to be very useful and that is not something I did before.  
As activities like X3D ramp up, I find I am applying more and more 
of the wall-to-wall markup concepts from the middle years of SGML 
and they work in the XML infrastructure of tools.  This is actually 
quite delightful.

len

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