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Clark Evans wrote: > > Well. I thought that I had completely failed, so I left. > Then, about two weeks later I went over to visit, (hadn't > received any more pleas for HTML help...) and I found her > using an editor to hand create the HTML! I was a bit > stunned. She said writing HTML in an editor directly > was "easier". She quickly added that composer is good > too, but only to "find what I want". She uses it to > 'draw' what she wants, looks at the 'view source' and > then ALT-TABBS over to the editor to do the 'real' work. That is pretty much the way it went for SGML editors too until the file got very big or one dropped a right quotation in a literal. Then, thank Charles for the original cheap SGML parser which was rewritten as SGMLS. Some say it wasn't great code, but it was fast and it found the tagging errors. Also observed, people think HTML is great and for what we use for, the rendering pass, it is in much the same way its antecedents like DSR were. Yes, lord love a duck, we edited DSR by hand too. Still, when we got to the complex content in some of the systems which used stylesheets instead (circa 1986 to 93), we found people had a much easier time with content tagging, eg, <part> <partno> because they could look at the markup and knew precisely what was there. A RPSTL (parts table) was easy to pick out in the mass of tags. The same was true of the editors which were context sensitive. That XML is replicating the SGML experience in the main is not surprising. That SGML is slightly easier to edit isn't surprising either since some of the features of SGML that went away in XML, eg, minimization, were editing features. Other features such as quantities needed in the days of precious RAM aren't missed as much. For that reason, many of us writing editors for applications to use HTML or other markup even when using a relational system for storage are writing node editors instead of hardwired tag stackers. Because we can use tables to store meta-properties, this is easy to do. len 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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