Re: [xml-dev] "Introducing MicroXML, Part 1: Explore the basicprinciples

[John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>]

Len Bullard scripsit:

> If PIs are not available, this will likely eliminate MicroXML as a
> markup language for composition intensive applications where
> content-tagged structures such as Notes, Cautions and Warnings must by
> specification be bound to the same page.  IOW, it and any applications
> using it are pretty much shut out of the mil-technical manual business
> because this kind of information is out-of-band and often denoted by
> PIs.

I came to the same conclusions, and compromised:

1) PIs are in the syntax, but not in the data model.  In MicroLark,
if you want them, you have to use the pull or the push parser, because
the tree parser ignores them.  There's even a switch to turn them into
fatal errors, if you decide you really don't want to deal with them.

2) Syntactically they have to look like start-tags except for the
<? and ?>.  That was pragmatic: there are a lot of widely used PIs that
already look like that, and it made parsing them trivial.  They are
reported with the pseudo-attributes already nicely parsed.

> For example:
> 
> <?pub _newline?>

<?pub _newline="yes"?>, or perhaps even <?pub _line="new"?>.

> Some rather large organizations would have to rewrite applications and
> convert large datasets.  For those organizations, the decision to remain
> with XML is made for them.

Indeed, and so it should be.  People who were heavily invested in SGML
didn't throw it all away and convert to XML, not if they were rational
economic actors.  As they needed to modernize their systems, they may
have redesigned them on an XML base.

-- 
John Cowan    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan   <cowan@ccil.org>
    "Any legal document draws most of its meaning from context.  A telegram
    that says 'SELL HUNDRED THOUSAND SHARES IBM SHORT' (only 190 bits in
    5-bit Baudot code plus appropriate headers) is as good a legal document
    as any, even sans digital signature." --me