RE: [xml-dev] 10th anniversary of the annoucement of XML ..need help

["Bullard, Claude L \(Len\)" <len.bullard@intergraph.com>]

On Jun 6, 2006, at 9:06 AM, Bullard, Claude L ((Len)) wrote:

>> And in IDEAS/IADS (Unisys/USAMICOM) that supported dtd-less
stylesheet 
>> based coding.

>I forgot about IADS, but yet, that too. FWIW. EBT's DynaText did not
require DTD's (but could take advantage of them), 
>and I think SoftQuad could be used without them too. In all cases, the
subset was similar to XML, and in (I believe) all
> cases, the stylesheets were more powerful than CSS in that they could
also define hypermedia behaviour.

Yes.  AE could turn validation on and off for editing.   I had minimal
exposure to Dynatext (It was a competitor. :-)), but it was well liked
in CALS circles.  A bit pricey as I recall but everything was then.
The Army had IADS developed so they could maintain it given the high
cost of the content and the long lifecycles.  It is still used so
weirdly enough, is the survivor because it lived in an edge ecotone.
True statement about the stylesheets too.  I got the Unisys folks to
quit using PI s for hyperlinks, but only with persuasive threats because
logically, they were the right choice.  We showed that doing HTML was
trivial, but Unisys reacted stupidly.  One can only look back with a
mixture of awe and dread.  Having seen that same behavior at GE, Unisys,
Lockheed Martin and Intergraph, I realize now that there is a lot of
truth to the phrase "the other guy innovates".  Some companies don't do
that well, although I note that those that do it worst tend to be
RFP-driven, so they are always surfing behind the wave.

>> IDEAS was the commercial version of IADS with DTD batch support 
>> as-needed.  IADS was offered free to the world and provided an
example 
>> for Yuri and Dr. Goldfarb that the techniques for markup that would 
>> become XML did work in hypermedia.

>Don't forget Steve DeRose and DynaText, which I would personally argue
was superior to SoftQuad.

I concur.  DeRose was so far ahead of most of us that it was hard to
follow him.  That is the other danger:  anything that is completely new
is also unrecognizable.  OTOH, he is business-smart and Dynatext did
well.

>> XML is outcome of many separate efforts to make SGML suitable for 
>> hypert

>Yep, and led by people wanting more powerful capabilities than those
offered by HTML etc. Even now many of the core 
>benefits that were desired are missing in the WWW.

They had to. They were already selling the systems, knew the true
history of hypermedia back to Englebart, and weren't so caught up in the
web fever.  There was the resignation of having to repeat history to
stay in business.

>The fact is that anyone with a reasonable amount of SGML experience
ended up using a core subset similar to XML.
> Ultimately there was little new in XML, because it was based on
something with a fairly long history. Some things, like
> I18N and explicit DTD-less support were good additions.

True statement.  Most of the flames I remember were matters of degree.
There was the camp that wanted schemas to die altogether (any schema of
any kind) and those that had uses for them.  Then there was the linking
designs.  The web guys won that one with running code and a more
practical approach.  OTOH, most of the pre-web link designs still live
on in various projects.   There is a better understanding of the
unnecessary dichotomy of links and functions now.

What the hypermedia community got from the web that it didn't really
spend much time on before was the necessity of stateless systems to
achieve scale.   What the web designers have yet to fully grasp is the
impact of real-time models on the state of statelessness.   As the web
2.0 saga pushes on, they will finally confront the bigger challenge of
models where scalar motion/time dominates the design.

len