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Michael Champion said:
>> From: vdv@dyomedea.com> To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org> Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2006
>> 12:46:14 +0100> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Minimal XML Specification
>> > The metaphor is misused IMO: XML in general (and WXS in particular)
>> was> becoming a monkey with three arms and some people were trying to
>> avoid> it!
> I agre with Eric's recollection - the minimalism ranting was a *reaction*
> to the obvious inevitability of W3C XSD by early 2000 or so. Also
> remember that the minimalist ranting was as much a reaction to the nasty
> innards of XML itself as to the XSD drafts. I know my Day Job life today
> is made just as miserable by DTDs as XSD, but it was way too late to do
> anything about XML in late 1999 - early 2000.
So Minimal XML etc were being developed to make markup languages that
would evade XSD's crystal-balled complexity? Simplifying syntax/infoset
seems a rather lateral if not Amish approach to that goal :-)
I raised it at the time, before the hundreds of hours
of some of the brightest brains in the community were diverted:
http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/199911/msg00360.html
"The debate about a simpler XML is just a waste of time.
Where are the people debating about a simpler XML Schema
proposal! That is something where people might have some
impact? "
and http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/199911/msg00398.html
"And, as for whether SML is a distraction from XML schemas, how many
postings have there been on XML-DEV about the structure drafts? There
have been a couple of good ones about the datatypes, but not on the
structures, that I recall. I predict that the moment that the XML
Schema becomes a recommendation, this mailing list will bustle with
well-reasoned calls for simplified XML Schema--alas too late."
XSD was the watershed where XML standards development passed from
being driven by the community to big vendors. I can understand if
you are saying that Minimal XML, SML etc were influenced by this
sea change, as some kind of last democratic gasp. But the community
fiddled while Rome burned.
But it isn't all bad news: the torch has passed to the more
productive persuit of promoting a stack made from technologies
which seem simpler (AJAX, POX, XForms and so on, which marginalize
structural schemas and static typing) or which are more rigorous
(XQuery, RELAX NG, Schematron, which have more formalized definitions.)
Cheers
Rick Jelliffe
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