xml-dev - RE: Will XML change the character of W3C?

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

The people are the same and the experience of 
these people made the next step possible.  The point is, it 
didn't happen in a vacuum.  People with lots of experience 
had to get together and agree, and those agreements involved 
some noisy mail.   They based it on the work they had 
done.  If XSL had continued with Schema (the language), 
it would have died on the vine.  Some thought it should 
have gone forward with that having seen the FOSI roast 
on the pointy bracket spit, but in the end, it seems 
they realized that it was better to roast it than let 
it chill.

Had XML not been a W3C project, it is likely 
(if deRose could have gotten his pages and pages and 
pages of changes in), it could have come from ISO.  It 
is hard to imagine how the barriers, real and political 
that were being erected could have been torn down though.  
Going to the W3C was the fastest way to go around the 
Imagi-Not Line.
  
Frankly, I would have preferred ISO but I saw the 
personalities in action and knew that wasn't going 
to happen.  Don't ever tell anyone that a group of 
saints created XML, just pragmatists.  It comes 
down to individuals.  I repeat it for emphasis, 
and folks, not always nice, courtly, ones.  Sometimes 
someone has to be BerserkerOnTheBridge and that is 
not a job for a nice person.  It is a job that 
sometimes needs a hypeSter to clean up.  Yet point 
by point, nasty or nice, each paragraph gets hammered 
into the final draft.

Abstract or concrete, by law, XML is a subset of SGML. 
That was the compromise that made the deal possible. 
XML changes no characters anywhere.  It just makes 
them the same everywhere.  It is a bridge.

Len 
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: Sean McGrath [mailto:sean@digitome.com]


At 09:09 AM 10/16/00 -0500, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:

>XML is SGML-lite.  XSLT is DSSSL recast.

The former is true in the abstract but not in the concrete
as anyone who has tried to process XML with pre-XML
SGML tools will tell you.

The latter has no basis in fact that I am aware of other
than that they both share the same general approach.
The same could be said of a lot of acronym tuples
(GIF,BMP), (MP3,WAV) etc. I don't think it
helps much.

If anything, XSLT is what you get if you take
the part of DSSSL that was never implemented and
re-engineer it from scratch.