Re: [xml-dev] Debating "civil disobedience" against overly complicatedspecs

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 08:43 PM 9/24/2001 +1000, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
>It is a natural tendency to, when we find that our document type does not
>need certain features, to want to remove them from the information set
>or from what the parser recognises. I don't see anything wrong with
>a parser implementing only the markup recognition that a particular
>application needs, as long as it keeps the layering clear: that it rejects,
>say, attributes not because of an XML error but because of an early-caught
>validity error.

That's very, uh, SGML of you Rick.

It doesn't however, seem to fit very well with the ideas which animated XML 
1.0 in the first place.  I'd suggest that the notion of a generic parser 
which can be used in any application, as well as the notion of generic 
syntax which can be parsed by any of those generic parsers is an important 
part of what defines "XML" as a set of practices and seems pretty tightly 
built into the XML 1.0 specification.

Even the 'separatist' Simplified Markup Language movement seemed to 
preserve the notion of generic parsers, albeit for an even simpler set of 
markup tools than XML.

On the other hand, may it would make some people happy to declare SOAP an 
SGML Protocol, and then that annoying "Simple" on the front of it could 
mean "SGML".

Simon St.Laurent
Associate Editor
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.