xml-dev - RE: A call for reason, another go [SML et al]

["Gavin Thomas Nicol" <gtn@ebt.com>]

> Frankly, I am somewhat dismayed by the lack of vision and
> paranoia over the supposedly endangered future of XML.  Has
> it ever occurred to anyone that messages asking me and others
> to stop working on SML is just plain weird?  Is XML-DEV turning
> into a political organization in charge of protecting XML from
> mutants and anything that dares to use angled brackets?  I am
> rather alarmed by all this.  Is XML so vulnerable that even all
> the media hype over XML is still not enough?  Where is Darwin
> in all this?

The sentiment is correct here. My concern is not about XML's
survival, so much as about the necessity, or lack thereof
of a new syntax.

My gut feeling tells me that in the end, people will, over time,
tend to use XML in certain application domains in certain ways.
In the XML-for-data world, nobody will use external entities, or
internal subsets... and so, by application convention, they will
produce their own subset. That's fine by me (let a thousand
application subsets bloom). 

At some point in time, they may even decide that it's really 
necessary to codify the subset as a standard in and of itself. 
That's fine by me too (it happened a few times in the SGML
community).

That said, I think it's still early days: far too early to be
formally defining a subset for general use. I take the 
disagreement on this mailing list to be a sure sign of that.


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