Re: Recognizing the contribution of the developers of XML

[peter murray-rust <pm286@xxxxxxxxx>]

At 07:07 29/08/2006, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
>peter murray-rust wrote:
>>Remember also that XML was a direct descendant of SGML. SGML was 
>>typical first version system - over-ambitious and (I believe) never 
>>fully implemented in a single piece of software.
>There are two optional features in SGML that were not implemented by 
>the dominant parsers
>(OmniMark, SP, SGMLS) which were DATATAG and CONCUR. IIRC there were
>private systems that used them however. (E.g. TEI has CONCUR YES.)

I didn't mean to imply that there weren't good compliant 
implementations of SGML :-) merely that AFAIK there was no   (widely 
available) system that did everything in one package. And in my 
position - academic or self employed the only reasonable option was 
(n)sgmls.  I *was* interested in CONCUR and I didn't find it possible 
to find a system on which I could develop my ideas. Perhaps that is a blessing.

>To say that SGML was never fully implemented assumes that the spec 
>was written with that
>assumption.

I didn't say that :-) ... I am aware that all parts of the SGML spec 
were implemented *somewhere* but that one might have to buy two 
implementations to have a complete range of functionality.

>On the contrary, the provision of optional features with clear 
>conformance levels
>shows otherwise. That James Clark or Sam Willmott or whoever decided 
>not to implement
>a certain optional part of SGML shows it is good to have optional 
>parts not enormous monolithic standards. So I am not aware of any 
>part of ISO 8879 that was not implemented somewhere.

I am also keen on levels of compliance in design and am trying to 
implement this in CML when possible. I think XML made a reasonably 
good decision about what was optional (e.g. validating parsers). 
MathML also has different levels of compliance. Are there other XML 
specs which have major compliance levels?

>P.




Peter Murray-Rust
Unilever Centre for Molecular Sciences Informatics
University of Cambridge,
Lensfield Road,  Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069