Re: breaking up?

[Tom Bradford <bradford@dbxmlgroup.com>]

"Simon St.Laurent" wrote:
> 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.

I see the state of things as being similar to the problem of Java the
Language vs. Java the Platform.  The Java language is simple, and
approachable.  The JDK 1.0 was a minimal runtime library for doing what
one absolutely needed to with the Java language.  Since then, Sun's
"Java Platform" grew.  It's now a monster, where a lot of the useful
features of the original runtime are there, but are increasingly
difficult to find in the haystack of niceties.  Unfortunately, because
Java is a proprietary offering, you can't just extract the minimalist's
version (unless you're Microsoft, of course... in which case you call it
C#).  At least in the case of XML, there's no proprietary hold over the
technology, and the boundaries between XML 1.0 and everything else in
the 'XML Platform' aren't yet sufficiently blurred that it can't easily
be done.

-- Tom