Re: The SAX2 standard ? (was SAX2 bugs -- please file!)

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

Nicolas LEHUEN wrote:


> 2) Yet, DOM is an "official" spec supported by the W3C,  whereas SAX is not,
> and gets to live on SourceForge. What will be the standardizing power of the
> SAX community ? I mean, what guarantees that a vendor won't change the API
> to suit its own need, thus breaking all possibilities of tool chaining ?


There aren't any, except the guarantee that companies don't like to cut
their own throats.  SAX is small, neutral, and fills a need.  Just
because an industry consortium like OASIS or W3C or Unicode, or a
standards body like ANSI, DIN, JIS, or ISO for that matter, pushes
a specification doesn't make anyone adopt it.

OTOH, Perl is rather uniform throughout the industry, basically because
there is only one implementation, but it is no standard.

> 4) Note the "official" in question 2. I'm very far from being an expert in
> standardization organisms, so please pardon me if I make mistakes, but
> shouldn't XML be an ISO / IEEE / other standard ? What are the historical
> reasons that gave the W3C control over the XML standardization ?


Historically, XML began as "Simplified SGML for the Web".  Jon Bosak
pushed W3C into creating a committee to specify such a thing; it
caught on big.

> What is the position of the
> "traditional" standardization organisms regarding W3C ? Does the industry
> consider the W3C as being pertinent for these issues ?


It would be possible to get XML standardized by ISO, assuming someone
was interested in the necessary machinations.  Technically, one can
specify XML by specifying SGML and then restricting it in certain ways.
See the James Clark Note on SGML and XML at the W3C site.

 
> 5) I'm don't know much about SGML. What is the standardization level of this
> technology ? Is it ISO, IEEE or something else ?


ISO.

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