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   Re: [xml-dev] Programming for Markup vs. Markup for Programming

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8/2/2002 11:17:06 AM, "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com> wrote:
>


>I'd be very happy at this point to have fewer tools and fewer people 
>interested in using XML in exchange for people actually focusing on quality 
>markup, interoperability, and pushing forward with the "less is more" 
>spirit that animated XML 1.0.

One more try at sorting out my complex agreement/disagreement with Simon:

I wouldn't say that bums like you should be thrown out, but perhaps
you would be happier breathing new life into the SGML world than
in laying down in front of the PSVI/WXS/XQuery logging trucks that are
"despoiling" the XML world.  

SGML has some cool things that XML doesn't have, especially the ability
to define minimalist profiles of the syntax that tell a potential
consumer what they have to understand in order to use your document.
Stick to the subset of SGML that overlaps with XML and you can use
SAX, XSLT, etc. as you see fit. Down the road, you can use (maybe 
isolated via a preprocessor) the other features that SGML has to
make authoring less tedious.  Also, SGML doesn't have one thing
that XML perhaps shouldn't have, or at least should have thought
harder about, i.e. namespaces.

Wearing my "author of structured documents" hat, I'd love to see SGML
revitalized so authoring is less tedious not entangled with 
WXS and namespace cruft. But wearing my "processor of syntax-agnostic
structured information" hat, I'm reasonably happy with the *core* of
the InfoSet world and wouldn't consider for a moment trying to do things
at the syntax level.






 

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