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Take it any way you want; killing off SGML is a death
sentence for the freedom to develop markup according
to what is needed over what one thinks is needed. It
is not a matter of moving beyond roots. That we
will do and have done. It is matter of insisting
on coherent specifications under the aegis of
powerful standards, and of balancing the powers that
produce these such that a radical fundamentalism
doesn't engage a positive relativism in such a way
as to leave us playing Highlander games.
It is political. It is social. These things count.
Elegant programming alone won't make it happen. We
aren't rubber ducks in a bathtub. SGML is a living
standard still in use, still in play. While that
can be an uncomfortable fact for those who want
one and only one organization and group to control
XML development, for the rest, it is the key to
keeping options open, choices available, a different
court to plead a case if one court becomes too overloaded
with special interests. One doesn't solve polarities;
one manages them.
Ummm... I like the infoset, DOM, and even namespaces
when applied sensibly. They get me cheap interoperable
tools that I didn't have when all I had was a parser,
an ASCII editor, and a stylesheet compiler. I don't
want to see the tools go away at all. I want the tool
to be adaptible to the needs of the humans; not make
the humans adapt to the needs of the tools. We
need more markup specialists because they are
the people who can spend the time in the committees
grinding on a data definition that people will use.
We also need (and the SGML experience made this
very plain too) programmers with the savvy to
interpret what comes out of committee and into code.
XML is the bridge between the worlds.
No one should claim primacy over the bridge or
soon they will have to put up guards on both
ends, and the walk to freedom will be a prisoner
exchange. If we are going to that, I'd just
as soon go back to gigging in bars for a living.
I've already done too much time in the short
sword wars.
"The top must listen to the bottom. Not having
memory is how we keep getting into these messes."
Col. David Hackworth, commenting at a book signing
on how Vietnam became a quagmire.
len
From: Mike Champion [mailto:mc@xegesis.org]
8/2/2002 9:48:40 AM, "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com> wrote:
>Keep ISO 8879 alive. It is ISO that guarantees that markup
>is the property of the commons.
I'm not sure I agree with Len's characterization of the W3C or
the intelligence quotient of those who think that XML should
move beyond its SGML roots <grin>, but I do agree with the importance
of keeping ISO 8879 alive.
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