xml-dev - RE: XML and SML

[Vane Lashua <vlashua@RSGsystems.com>]

The hostility is probably from a continuing frustration with economics and
common sense. SGML has been around for 15 years. A committee from the
Association of American Publishers met with the MS Word product manager at
the First MS CD-ROM conference (remember that?-- Internet World will go the
way of the CD-ROM conference one of these days) about implementing "simple"
SGML in MS Word and to use the AAP's recently developed Book, Journal, and
Magazine dtds. After all, Word had practically invented "styles" which
practically implemented GML which blah blah blah. It obviously didn't
happen.

Now Office 2000 is promising (still promising!) to use XML as an interchange
standard. Even with the bloat required to support Office 2000, the brains
don't seem to be in place to implement something that James Clark appears to
be able to do in his sleep, practically on a toaster.

There is computer power galore to implement full-blown SGML, XML, HTTP, a
browser and Unix in a toaster today. Would it (the computer power) even cost
$50? Would it even take 6 months to get it accomplished?

There are lots of ways to be a genius. Don't waste our Earth's resources
(your brain and energy) re-inventing something that will be out of date,
unnecessary, or simply out of gas in another 6 months.

Vane


-----Original Message-----
From: Don Park [mailto:donpark@docuverse.com]
Sent: Friday, November 12, 1999 6:58 AM
To: xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Subject: RE: XML and SML


Rick,

>Let us not forget that LISP S-expressions (parenthesis)
>have been around for 35 years; they are simple and can be
>used for markup, but they didn't take off for that use.  
>And Borenstein has that RFC on a markup language that 
>is simpler than XML and just used elements: it has been 
>around for ages and has gone nowhere for documents.

LISP S-expressions is definitely not XML.  Is And Borenstein's
markup language XML?  SML is and I believe it makes a difference.

>I think the internationalization in XML is one of the major
>reasons larger companies like it: it provides an integration 
>path from current encodings to Unicode--people who
>think it is now time to have only UTF-8 have their heads 
>in the sand: so we need encoding headers & NCRs & 
>attributes (to support language) as a minimum requirement
>for i18n IMHO.

That is great for the larger companies.  They can use the full
XML and so will I for applications where i18n is a key factor.
I don't mind using UTF-8 for those occasional foreign characters
so there is no conflict.

Now, why would you mind if I used a simple subset of XML features
and gave it a name?  I do not see how that hurts those large
companies.

>If there is a strong need for a simpler markup language,
>I think it needs to target a particular issue in which XML
>is weak: difficulty of implementation just isn't one of them.
>Who are these poor implementers of parsers we need to be
>so concerned about: IBM? Sun?  Microsoft? James Clark 
>has not conspicuously favoured simple software projects.

Try cramming full a XML parser into a toaster.  When you
got some space left, throw in a compression library as well.

>In what way is it simpler to make up a new markup language, 
>document it, write a parser and API for it, compared to using
>XP or one of the Java parsers?  The area where there is scope
>for a new markup language is for large tables of fielded data
>in which every field is the same: now I know that compression
>takes care of this really, but some people still freak out when they 
>see markup: *but* there is a recent RFC  this month on such
>a language.  It is a nice language, but if you compare it to XML
>you can see the maturity of the SGML/XML community
>in comparison.

You can still use XP or one of the Java parsers to parse SML since
it is XML.  I don't see where this argument is going.

>The debate about a simpler XML is just a waste of time.
>Where are the people debating about a simpler XML Schema
>proposal!  That is something where people might have some
>impact?  Anders and Len are doing something useful bringing
>up these schema issues. With all respect, but I hope that people
>who want SML should move to SML-DEV: I already get over
>200 emails a day. Jokes are welcome but not farces.

I don't think the SML discussion is taking attention away
from XML Schema discussions.  Why all the hostility, Rick?

Don Park    -   mailto:donpark@docuverse.com
Docuverse   -   http://www.docuverse.com


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