Time for 4ML?

["Christopher R. Maden" <crism@maden.org>]

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rjelliffe@allette.com.au wrote:
> <rant/>

Rick, as always, makes some excellent points.

It has been more than ten years since XML 1.0 was published, and I think
we’ve learned as much or more about how people actually want to use it
and how they actually used it than we did about SGML in its first ten years.

So perhaps it’s time to start an “XML for the Web” WG and consider the
next generation (which I number the 4th in its line to end in “ML”).

Some starting points that come to mind:

• The data set should be standardized as well as the syntax.
• Pointy brackets work pretty well, but equivalent plain-text syntaxes
are popular (see wiki, RELAX NG).
• Namespaces are a good idea.  Colons are acceptable delimiters.  URIs
are irritating as unique identifiers.
• Structures that are syntactically identical but actually discrete are
irritating and confusing (namespace declarations vs. attributes value
specifications).
• Data type support is important.
• Schema declarations should be in a vocabulary of the primary language,
not its own language.

This may only seem like a good idea to me because I haven’t had my tea
yet, but I think it may be time to do this.

~Chris
- --
Chris Maden, text nerd  <URL: http://crism.maden.org/ >
“All I ask of living is to have no chains on me,
 And all I ask of dying is to go naturally.” — Laura Nyro
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