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

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

"Hunter, David" <dhunter@Mobility.com> writes:

> Perhaps from the point of view of a parser writer, this might be a
> good thing.  If you knew you were never going to need these
> constructs, you could build a smaller, faster parser.

Not much smaller, I'm afraid -- for an event-based parser, support for 
PIs and attributes adds almost no overhead (I remember experimenting
with putting them in and leaving them out when I was writing
AElfred).

AElfred, by the way, was under 15K in a compressed JAR file when I was
maintaining it, though it wasn't strictly conformant (it didn't report
all required errors) -- I still believe that someone could write a
Java-based XML parser in under 10K (compressed) if they had the time
and inclination and made more use of the standard Java libraries.

> From the point of view of applications that use XML, however, SML
> would not provide much gain, except perhaps the slight speed
> advantage of using one of these stripped down, souped up parsers; as
> Leigh Dodds pointed out, you could just use XML without the features
> you don't need.

Agreed.

If we were still designing XML, I would be in favour of at least a
good part of Don's list, but now that the deed is done and we've
obviously won (the only debates now are what XML-based languages to
use), we should learn to live with the XML syntax that we have and
concentrate on the higher-level stuff.


All the best,


David

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

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1
To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
unsubscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)