Re: breaking up?

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 10:59 AM 05/08/01 -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>On the other side seem to be people who find the results of XML 1.0 interesting but not nearly good enough by themselves.  These folks seem intent on decorating XML with a number of features - Namespaces, W3C XML Schema, XInclude, etc. - which add to XML's capabilities at some cost in its clarity.

Hmm, do you claim that all the things that have been piled on
XML 1.0 fall into a single qualitative bucket?  It seems to me that
Namespaces, XSLT, and XSchema (to pick 3) are horses of very different 
colours, in terms of scope, philosophy, and general intellectual space.

To me, the fragmentation point is between those who think the 
data structures are the real thing - the Schema/Infoset/PSVI/Query
world-view - and those who want to maximize interoperability at
the level of syntax: XML/namespaces/SAX/maybe-XSLT.  And I agree
with Simon that this fragmentation is not necessarily damaging.

I have to say that a high proportion of the real-world apps
of XML I see are concerned with generating tags & attributes
at one end of an interface and parsing them at another, and
the people writing them never think for an instant about infosets
or subelement qualification.  And hand-creation and on-screen
viewing of XML are quite common, but mostly in design & debug
mode, which seems appropriate. -Tim


>Maybe it's time for these two groups to go their separate ways.  XML 1.0 itself, in my view, already gave the 'decorators' too many features, and we've been cursed with odd warning labels (think external subsets) ever since.
>
>Maybe we should look at XML 1.0 as a shared foundation, but not expect XML itself to be a solution.  It's a starting point, both for people who want less and people who want more, a compromise that worked very well for a time but can't last forever.
>
>I know that there are those who want XML kept as monolithic as possible, a shared set of tools which can be applied neatly in every situation.  The tools we have, however, aren't monolithic, aren't even necessarily interoperable, and give different groups of people very different problems.
>
>I think markup would survive such a fragmentations, and survive usefully.  It already does.
>
>Simon St.Laurent
>
>
>
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