Sure, nothing goes away. A stable business should expect their backend can be kept alive -if evolving- for 20-30 years. I am still working with SGML systems sometimes! They tick away happily: we usually hide them as services behind a POX SOA facade for now. (And we recently find it easier to find Omnimark developers than Xslt developers with publishing experience: the xslt developers we do find are often database-to-HTML people: so they know nothing about modes, priorities, ids, functions, encodings, predicates or other bread-and-butter document issues.)
One of the simplifications of XML was to move to newlines instead of SGML's Record Start/Record End signals. Off the mainframe and onto the commodity computers.
Do I remember that Digital's VMS OS didn't have text files, only records?
Rick
On 18 Dec 2014, at 03:26, Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au> wrote:Not entirely superseded. UNIX and DOS file systems, and most internet protocols, have great difficulty representing the kind of file that is common on mainframes, where a file is a sequence of records and a record is a sequence of arbitrary bytes, but such files do still exist.In the first decades of computing, there were two kinds of "newlines". One was control codes for printers: carriage return and line feed. The other was record start and end signifiers for tape storage: think COBOL or FORTRAN.
By the 1990s, both kinds of raw newlines had been superseded: drivers hid device details, and Apis took hid drivers. Newlines were for formatting things on screen or for markup.
Michael KaySaxonica