xml-dev - Re: Feeler for SML (Simple Markup Language)

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

"Don Park" <donpark@docuverse.com> writes:

> 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.

It's too late -- since XML has already succeeded in gaining wide
implementation as it is, it would be like buying insurance for the
previous year.  

XML has been implemented so widely, and there are so many free and
commercial parsers, libraries, and toolkits available that there would
be no significant advantage (and great dangers) in creating a separate
dialect at this point.

Even if the separate dialect is a pure subset, it will still split the
XML market for no good reason: applications that support only the
subset will reject well-formed XML documents that happen to fall
outside the subset.

That said, it's certainly useful to define APIs that hide some of that
stuff -- applications should not have to worry about unparsed
entities, notations, etc. unless they want to.  SAX was one attempt to
do so.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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