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Re: Feeler for SML (Simple Markup Language)

• From: David Megginson <david@m...>
• To: xml-dev@i...
• Date: Thu, 11 Nov 1999 12:43:38 -0500 (EST)

"Hunter, David" <dhunter@M...> writes:

> Perhaps from the point of view of a parser writer, this might be a
> good thing.  If you knew you were never going to need these
> constructs, you could build a smaller, faster parser.

Not much smaller, I'm afraid -- for an event-based parser, support for 
PIs and attributes adds almost no overhead (I remember experimenting
with putting them in and leaving them out when I was writing
AElfred).

AElfred, by the way, was under 15K in a compressed JAR file when I was
maintaining it, though it wasn't strictly conformant (it didn't report
all required errors) -- I still believe that someone could write a
Java-based XML parser in under 10K (compressed) if they had the time
and inclination and made more use of the standard Java libraries.

> From the point of view of applications that use XML, however, SML
> would not provide much gain, except perhaps the slight speed
> advantage of using one of these stripped down, souped up parsers; as
> Leigh Dodds pointed out, you could just use XML without the features
> you don't need.

Agreed.

If we were still designing XML, I would be in favour of at least a
good part of Don's list, but now that the deed is done and we've
obviously won (the only debates now are what XML-based languages to
use), we should learn to live with the XML syntax that we have and
concentrate on the higher-level stuff.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@m...
           http://www.megginson.com/

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