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Re: [xml-dev] RE: James Clark: XML versus the Web

    And perhaps some further movement forward.

    To this relatively inexperienced viewer, this seems like going back to 2002 is an interesting way to get started, if the goal is a short specification.   

    However, it seems that fundamentally XML is a specification language, for a lot more than markup, and that many of the basic extensions over the last decade have made it, extremely powerful in dealing with data for many purposes.  The issue is that these extensions are complex and inconsistent.

    It seems that the basis for some of the problems are with the current language itself,  but many are with the additional standards and especially how they  interact.  Many of these problems with the additional standards, though, stem, not from themselves, but from deficiencies in the basic language capabilities.

    It would appear then, as noted in other posts on this topic, that the starting point should be on a set of fundamental language extensions, such as those that deal with data types, expressions and probably most importantly - modularization to simplify and standardize interactions among related specifications.  Development would proceed based with a clear focus on what is fundamental to the language, what is needed for application models, such as presentation, and what is needed for compatibility.  

  Syntax simplification would provide a sugar coating to encourage implementation and adaptation.

  As James Clark put it in his original post on this thread “the challenge is how to  . . . create technologies . . . that bring to the broader Web developer community some of the good aspects of the modern XML development experience”.  It would seem that, for the long term, this must require a considerable rebuilding based on architectural fundamentals, rather than just updating.  And this indeed seems much larger, and certainly more comprehensive, than the transition from SGML to XML.

 
 
In a message dated 12/3/2010 4:35:32 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, davep@dpawson.co.uk writes:
Moving this on somewhat.

Part II, Looking forward


Background:
From James blog.
JC "Now you could actually quite easily take XML 1.0, ditch DTDs, add
XML Namespaces, xml:id, xml:base and XML Infoset and end up with a
reasonably short (although more than 10 pages), coherent spec. (I think
Tim Bray even did a draft of something like this once.) But in 10 years
the W3C and its membership has not cared enough about simplicity and
coherence to take any action on this."



Taking Tims baseline [1], does it meet the ideas of James proposal?
There is a good overlap, though eight years old. It is based on XML 1.0
Second edition, would you update it to fifth edition (with simplicity
in mind).

What shortfalls are there? Where is it too document centric? Could it
be simplified?

A fair metric. Could this be explained as per
http://markmail.org/message/nctnjvj4kaxtnkdb problem?





* References

I think this is Tims starter.
[1]http://www.textuality.com/xml/xmlSW.html
Sam Ruby collected some ideas
[2]http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2007/01/26/XML-2-0
Are there any more?
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset/ 
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-id/
[5] http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/
[6] http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-names/   namespace rec






--

regards

--
Dave Pawson
XSLT XSL-FO FAQ.
http://www.dpawson.co.uk

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