RE: [xml-dev] Real life XML (was: Suggestions for a slightly less verbose (andeasier to author) XML)

["Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@microsoft.com>]

I don't think anyone should seriously consider XHTML on the Web an
indication of where XML is most used or useful in the software industry.
In fact, I'd rather explicitly disallow any survey of XML usage that
counted XHTML since it's authors and consumers do not typically treat it
as XML. 

-- 
PITHY WORDS OF WISDOM 
When all else fails, read the instructions.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no
rights. 



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eric van der Vlist [mailto:vdv@dyomedea.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, June 25, 2002 11:58 AM
> To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: [xml-dev] Real life XML (was: Suggestions for a 
> slightly less verbose (andeasier to author) XML)
> 
> 
> I'd like to jump into this long running thread to ask the 
> question with a different perspective: isn't real life XML 
> already slightly less verbose than one would think?
> 
> I have had the opportunity to run an experimental survey 
> which is probably not significant but probably not false in a 
> huge proportion either and this survey gave me some food for 
> thought: only 1% of the document tested in this survey were 
> well formed XML.
> 
> Virtually all of them were XHTML but even in the documents 
> containing an XHTML declaration, less than 50% were well formed.
> 
> This survey has been run in March 2002, ie 2 years after 
> XHTML 1.0 and 4 years after XML 1.0.
> 
> It's showing IMO that it's still not obvious for many sites 
> to produce well formed XML and also that in practice we still 
> have to cope with HTML and all kind of strange markup.
> 
> It's also somewhere a chicken and egg kind of problem. As 
> long as the vast majority of documents available on the web 
> are not well formed there can be no penalty for them and 
> practical tools (such as web browsers or search engines) must 
> cope with them.
> 
> And as long as there is no penalty for them, why should 
> authors bother to produce well formed XML?
> 
> To make it short: if you feel like closing a tag, don't close 
> it and it won't probably make any difference...
> 
> Eric :-)))
> -- 
> See you in San Diego.
>                                
> http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2002/
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ----------
> Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            
> http://dyomedea.com
> (W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 
> http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ----------
> 
> 
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