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HI Bill, <YourComment> Lisp and XML have a few things in common, like being easy to determine if they are well formed. Frankly, I think XML will be better in the long run because it can be validated against various schema. </YourComment> <Reply> I am not sure of that. a) a Lisp document could be made SGML compliant because SGML can let you define begin and end tag's delimiters (Ex: dsssl). b) if the previous proposition is true, then you can also change the delimiters and keep the structural coherency. c) You could also enforce that a begin and end tag conform to the well formed constraint. d) a XML document is a hierarchy and a hisrarchy could be mapped with list constructs. In fact, as soon as you map lisp to SGML and then to XML, you notice immediately the similarities. There is formal transformation possible from one structure to the other. In mathematical term would coud talk of "topological" transformation from one to the other. Their structure are similar enough to transform one into the other. Conclusion: we should not take what Jonathan said so lightly and do some homework fisrt. This said, I agree that XML could potentially be more succesful than lisp or SGML or (fill here less than popular good ideas) but this is for other reasons than technical reasons. For instance, this could be very popular because the web is popular and XML benefit form the aura effect. Also because, important software manufacturer are behind it and put compliant products on the market. Also because poeple don't want to miss the next Web big success, etc... This has nothing to do with technical vertues but more with marketing vertues. But surely not because XML is bettern than lisp because it could be validated against different schemas. a) XML has the advantage, because of its strict syntax (compared to SGML omitags) that a receiver do not need to validate the structure to interpret the XML document. In fact, there is a high probability that interpreters would "hard code" in some ways what to do for each element and this without the need of a DTD. (except for style language that will "hard code" tree manipulation and formatting object model) b) If a DTD is necessary why not use SGML except for a marketing advantage then? c) An otehr usage of XML is to separate the content from the rendition. In this case, most of browsers' style engine won't contain a validating parser and therefore validation mechanism is irrelevant. Conclusion: XML will be better simply because it has marketing momentum not because of its technical merits period. The whole difference between SGML and XML is that the receiver do not necessarily need validation to interpret the document (because of the "well formed" constraint). But from the marketing point of view it has huge advantage. New domain languages could be created and big software manufacturers could again regain some control by creating a domain language and let the numbers create a de facto standard. In fact, HTML by being a standard domain language is more a threat to big manufacturer than XML is. So, if XML is to be more popular this is surely for marketing reasons :-) </Reply> Regards Didier PH Martin mailto:martind@n... http://www.netfolder.com xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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