Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair, was Re: [xml-dev] Designing information for eternity

On 11/19/2013 8:53 AM, Steve Newcomb wrote:
> There are many examples of SGML, many of them are more than twice that
> old, and some are still in daily use.  Do they count?  I think the
> question is important from the perspective of eternity.  Technically
> speaking, XML documents are SGML documents (it says here in ISO 8879 as
> amended) but the reverse is generally not true.  Will eternity ignore
> the SGML because it's not XML?  I doubt it.
Eternal? snort.

The text is not eternal, sorry, even if the ideas might in some sense 
be, and the data format is definitely more short-lived than the text.  
My reference point is OED: it started as little slips of paper, became 
(somehow) a bunch of books.  That form lasted quite long (80+ years?). 
Then there was OED2, another book, and the first digital edition: it was 
delivered to the web platform as SGML, and rendered as HTML, which was 
how most people saw it.  That lasted about 10 years. OED3 (which I 
worked on) was passed to us as XML, and although we also published OED2 
entries as a secondary resource, I never saw the SGML - it is preserved 
now primarily as HTML, because there's no need to treat it as a living 
text any more. That's almost 4 years old.  We'll see how long it lasts, 
but I doubt it'll make it to 10 before some other form takes it place.

-Mike