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From: David Megginson <david@m...> >What I did say is that there's not a practical difference among the >different alternatives in XML and SGML for expressing this >information, and probably not enough to justify the parallel >maintenance of the two as discrete standards. I don't agree because 1) XML is not a standard, because W3C is not an open process but a friendly conspiracy of vendors and boffins who must kowtow to Microsoft and TBL (not to say that these are not excellent activities). 2) XML and SGML have fundamentally different application areas driving them: * SGML is a compiler compiler where the central technical question is "people want markup in lots of different formats; how can we make a parser to detect the structure in as many of their formats as possible?" If you have shortrefs you must have maps and you must have entities and you must have minimization: they are justifiable because SGML is a parser technologym not an information-modeling technology. * XML just expands the butt of SGML: the fact that there are tree/graph structures in marked-up data. Now, I admit that butt-expansion is a natural function of time: SGML's default delimiters (as used in HTML and SGML at many companies) are now familiar enough that there is also a question "people want markup in SGML-delimiter format: how can we make a (simple) parser that detects the structure in just that?" Rick Jelliffe 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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