RE: [xml-dev] ten years later, time to repeat it?

[Len Bullard <len.bullard@uai.com>]

Let me be the first to throw the cold water. :-)

I'd say it will be far harder now than then.  In those days, the entire cast
of SGMLers could be squeezed into one conference room with lots of lurkers.
Today that would not be the case. 

Tim tells a good story from one point of view and a central one, but XML
gathered a very large pride of contributors particularly once the spec was
published and the hard work began in earnest.  How many applications and
their implementations will be undone or undoable?

In those days, while the sites that did use SGML were quite large and housed
mission critical data and were mostly in the US.  Today we have a problem
identifying what the most significant uses of XML are and where the
significant uses of XML are.  The ones we do know about, on the other hand,
are spread all the way across the planet.

<pointedTroll>
Are you actually DEFENDING the Mixed Content model, Simon?
</pointedTroll>

len


From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@simonstl.com] 
 
In celebration of XML's 10th anniversary yesterday, I thought it might 
be time to post a suggestion.

SGML became ISO 8879 in 1986.  Ten years later, the XML process was 
busily examining how to build a subset of SGML, keeping the good parts 
and discarding the rest.  XML 1.0 was the result.

I suspect my suggestion is fairly obvious: it's time to look into 
creating a subset of XML that hits the current 80/20 point - creating 
something that is (learning from the previous project) compatible with 
XML parsers, but which (again) does more by doing less.

As with XML, the imprimatur of some standards organization would be very 
helpful in spreading this simplification.

A lot of this work has already been discussed over the years - it's not 
an entirely new suggestion.  I'm mostly wondering if ten years is enough 
time to take the political sting out of the suggestion, though Tim Bray 
has certainly reminded everyone [1] that even at ten these kinds of 
things aren't simple.

I don't expect that this project would create the same kind of 
revolution that XML itself did - but it could continue the acceleration 
of data-sharing that XML provided.  (And while I do like JSON, 
mixed-content documents remain critically important.)

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