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Tim Bray writes:
> Rick Jelliffe wrote:
>
> > SGML - 85 pages (in my printed copy) without the annexes
> >
> > XML - 52 pages (printed out from a web browser, at a medium to small setting)
> > Add a couple of pages for XML 1.1 without the appendixes.
>
> Fair enough, but if you remove all the unicode-character apparatus
> from XML 1.0 you probably cut that in half.
... and the page count doesn't tell you all that much anyway. I spent
three months on and off trying to write an SGML parser in Java and
never made much progress; I had the first working draft of AElfred
done in an evening, and a quite usable parser in a couple of days (on
top my regular work responsibilities at the time) -- most of the rest
of the development time was spent on profiling and speed
modifications. The most common way to use SGML in Perl was through my
very slow SGMLSpm package; good, fast XML support in Perl sprung up
like weeds. And so on.
Perhaps that was the biggest difference: SGML was designed to make
life easier for users, while XML was designed to make life easier for
developers. Fortunately, it turned out that when developers are
happy, they write lots of software, and that ends up making users
happy as well.
All the best,
David
--
David Megginson, david@megginson.com, http://www.megginson.com/
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