Re: [xml-dev] SGML complexity (was: RE: [xml-dev] Re: Recognizing...)

[Tatu Saloranta <cowtowncoder@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- sterling <sstouden@thelinks.com> wrote:

> Seems to me, xml users have developed the
> sophistication to be 
> able to become SGML users and developers. Could SGML
> do all of 
> the work that has been thus far done by all of its
> sublanguages? 
> 
> Maybe time to tackle SGML and get rid of ml soup
> oflanguages.

To me it seems like pushing complexity from
business/app level down to lower (syntactic, markup)
level is unlikely to solve the problem. It's just
replacing N hard problems with 2 extremely hard
problems (supporting parsing and processing systems
for SGML). My experience has been that it's better to
tackle multiple easier problems instead of few hard
problems.

But if there are enough people who disagree, and think
it's time to re-evaluate use of SGML, all kudos to
them. If pendulum is about to swing back, so be it:
simplify, get frustrated, complicate, get frustrated,
repeat ad nauseaum.

I must say, though, that I find it strange that most
wanna-be markup languages that aim to replace XML do
that by complicating things (weird things like Yaml),
and try to make it easier to hand-edit markup (my
preference would be further simplifying XML).
If that's the goal, I would definitely suggest first
trying out SGML. Examples shown earlier, regarding
supporting wiki markup, were very interesting, and
illustrated power of SGML as the "mother of all markup
languages".

-+ Tatu +-


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com