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[Bill de hÓra <dehora@eircom.net> wrote:]
> Granted we've been here before about how developers find state machines
> awkward but it does leave open the possibility of being declared and
> then autogeneratated. Was this approach never taken with SGML?
[Arjun Ray]
>>Sure, though never in any standardized fashion. The frustrations with SAX
>>are recapitulations of the same frustrations with the output of (n)sgmls -
>>no surprise, since SAX is modeled on that implementation of ESIS, and even
>>more closely on David Megginson's SGMLS.pm package. (Which is to say, SAX
>>was not in any way an advance in the state of the art.)
SAX and ESIS are fundamentally different in one way - ESIS is a *notation*
produced by NSGMLS[1].
SAX is an API. You cannot grep an API. Hence PYX.
(http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/03/15/feature/).
The fact that SAX (an API) flourised and PYX (a notation) withered
on the vine could be seen as a bellweather here.
The majority of programmers *prefer* APIs to notations. Therefore
SOAP will be a runaway success.
<Bart>Dow! I better start liking APIs before the market gives
me a Wedgie for stepping out of line.</Bart>
Sean
[1] Strictly speaking, ESIS is an abstract description of an infoset. The
output
of NSGMLS is a reification of that abstraction into a syntax. James Clark
invented the syntax - "(" for open element "-" for data, "A" for attribute etc.
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