Re: [xml-dev] Use DTDs!

[Dave Pawson <dave.pawson@gmail.com>]

But he will find it.... eventually :-)

On 3 May 2016 at 14:09, Steve Newcomb <srn@coolheads.com> wrote:
> It has been said to me that XML's stripped-down character owes something to
> HyTime's willingness to account for everything, including parameter and
> general entities.  At the Metastructures '99 conference -- one of the
> conferences in Balisage's lineage -- TechnoTeacher circulated a full-page
> bubble diagram of a GROVE that represented an SGML document with a single
> element with a single word in content and a single attribute, using the
> full-blown "SGML Property Set" defined in HyTime.  The whole 8.5 X 11 page
> was covered with bubbles and lines.  There was nothing short of outrage on
> the conference floor.  The complexity of it all!  "The humanity!"  One
> famous person whispered to me, "Too ambitious." Another stood up to say,
> "This will never fly."  And he turned out to be quite right.
>
> But to my eye it was beautiful.  There was nothing extra, and nothing was
> missing, either.  It was just the way SGML actually worked, no more and no
> less.  Much of the complexity was owing to general entities, of which the
> document itself was one, as I recall.
>
> Somewhere I have that diagram.  I thought I had put it online, but I can't
> find it this morning.
>
>
> On 05/03/2016 07:59 AM, G. Ken Holman wrote:
>>
>> The same thing happened with Microstar's Near and Far DTD management tool.
>> It became essentially uni-directional from DTD to display.  No-one could use
>> it for production maintenance because the author's entity structure and
>> source expression evaporated.
>>
>> The mistake discovered on day two of the product was the thinking that
>> users would want to use the graphical tool for *all* of the DTD maintenance.
>> If it had been perceived correctly that users needed to preserve their own
>> concept of internal modularization, declaration ordering, commenting, etc.,
>> the product would have been designed differently from the ground up and
>> found a more appropriate role in the augmentation of the
>> development/maintenance process and not try to be the be-all and end-all of
>> model building.
>>
>> Peter Flynn's recent legacy project discussion has revealed that more than
>> 20 years later the product is still being used for visualization.  And I
>> think Tommie's coining of the term "DTD scat" still gets used (forgive me if
>> it was one of Tommie's colleagues who came up with the term).
>>
>> . . . . . . Ken
>>
>> At 2016-05-02 21:09 -0500, Christopher R. Maden wrote:
>>>
>>> On 05/02/2016 08:56 PM, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I think one of the limitations of the idea of grammar neutrality (ie
>>>> freely translate the schema into the particular grammar available for
>>>> each tool) is this lack of entity maintenance by some converters.
>>>> (Not a good term) Possibly it is a bigger problem than the different
>>>> power of the different grammars.
>>>
>>>
>>> This is what killed EBT.
>>>
>>> This is second-hand hearsay, through a filter of 20 years, but the
>>> DynaBase project had multiple big-ticket pre-orders before someone noticed
>>> that, in parsing the SGML, it normalized away all the entity references,
>>> which made it useless for actual ongoing document management, which was its
>>> primary selling point.
>>>
>>> Fixing that would have involved changes going down to the deepest layers
>>> of the parser... which was just no feasible on the announced schedule.
>>>
>>> So instead of an IPO making me rich, EBT was sold to Inso (which made a
>>> few people rich, entirely deservedly), who proceeded to run everything into
>>> the ground.
>>>
>>> <paul-harvey>Now you know... the rest of the story.</paul-harvey>
>>>
>>> ~Chris
>>
>>
>>
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