JC: I knew how insanely complex writing an SGML parser was. SGML is really doing something very simple. It's providing a standard way to represent a tree, and your nodes have a label with names and they can have attributes. That's all it's doing. It's not a complicated concept.

[John Cowan <johnwcowan@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 7:20 PM, Stephen Cameron <steve.cameron.62@gmail.com> wrote:

From an interview with James Clark, entitled:

JC: I knew how insanely complex writing an SGML parser was. SGML is really doing something very simple. It's providing a standard way to represent a tree, and your nodes have a label with names and they can have attributes. That's all it's doing. It's not a complicated concept.

Of course, that's really MicroXML, not XML.

[Personally, I wish people would stop fueling this notion of XML being too complex.]

James wouldn't agree: see his manifesto at http://blog.jclark.com/2010/12/microxml.html and the MicroXML CG draft at https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/microxml/raw-file/tip/spec/microxml.html.

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