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Use SGML? Well... ah heck, why not? HTML is an
example of that. It is possible to overbuild any
gencoded set. So tear it down into modules. Oops?
You mean the customers won't give up the earlier
versions because they work ok for what they want
to do? Ok. Take support out of the browser and
sideline them. Oops? You mean they won't accept
that and will go to a competitor if we do that?
Well, then, we need new features they can't get
anywhere else? Oops? You mean they call that
"proprietary"? Damm. Who sold us this markup crap?
Opennness comes at the cost of somebody supporting
the legacies of earlier designs/mistakes/features.
Why XML?
Because we wanted a simpler markup metaspec.
XML 1.0 is simpler. That is not the problem. The
problem is in the framework of applications specs that
surround it. SGML had very few of these and the ones
it did have (hytime, dsssl, fosi, esis, etc.) were just
about dry when the gencoded web exploded and forced
a do-over. Lots of folks processed SGML without
DTDs before XML. That wasn't the big leap. The
big leap was to accept the idea that state could
be conveyed in XML to loosely coupled applications.
So far so good: but if the exchange is blind, then
the a priori semantic description becomes a problem,
and is usually solved as all blind men solve that
problem; they feel around it and discover the shape.
As in the story, what they declare it to be varies,
but at least if they all describe it with the same
formalism, they can discover that too.
Me: I belive in Contract Deliverable Requirements
Lists, or in short; tell me the name of the super
schema that we will all be up and downtranslating
to. It takes time and patience to build such, but
ultimately, they do work. We built XML to enable
not blind interoperation, but to enable communities
of understanding to document their vocabularies and
use them in day to day communications. So far, so good.
But blind interoperation, anywhere, anytime with
anyone? Not hardly.
len
-----Original Message-----
From: Didier PH Martin [mailto:martind@netfolder.com]
Len said:
SGML just conflated well-formedness and validity.
Otherwise, XML works the same way as SGML. Both
depend on external documents ultimately.
Didier replies:
I agree Len, and the next question would be then, why use XML if it is
as complex and less versatile than SGML?
I though that the xml framework would be consistent, coherent, that
generic modules could be re-used because, in my own mental structure, it
seems to reduce the cognitive load imposed to it and finally, the
benefit I got with XML is that no external documents are needed to
process an instance (i.e. a document). Boy, we're far from that!
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