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1. XML is not pure hype. There are no pure plays. XML has been overhyped and part of that was at the expense of SGML. That was distasteful and said a lot about character. 2. XML 1.0 is less sophisticated. XML plus all of the application language infrstructure built around it (eg, XSLT) is much like SGML+OmniMark. Still not quite as powerful but cheaper. 3. SGML had a few free apps and more were coming, but time and the HTML juggernaut sidelined most of them. (Not all: I just attended and IADS meeting. The bloody thing lives.) That's ok because XML has A LOT more freeware tools and more importantly, support built directly into operating system frameworks, server frameworks, and so on. Quite a victory. 4. XML has some conceptual improvements. The adoption of a proven practice, well-formedness, is a big improvement. Use of instance syntax for production declarations is a big improvement. Namespaces are a minimal victory but a necessary one (there must be a way to build a true aggregate or we have to use SUBDOC: it may be the case that being able to do both is useful). 5. A big victory: we have a honking large and shared system to develop and field to and a means to unify namespace scope where needed. 6. The biggest victory: we have a very talented and active community of developers, users and customers. No money; no thrills. Thank HTML and the WWW for that one folks. All good stuff. All markup. Markup matters. len -----Original Message----- From: Daniel Veillard [mailto:veillard@r...] I was arguing against a statement that XML was pure hype and less sophisticated. It may be hype but there is more implementations to choose from, it may be less sophisticated but in practice things which were looking impossible with the previous toolchain becomes possible like formatting on the fly upon user request. One could probably had done that on SGML too, but not with free software apparently. The sophistication trade-off have a serious impact in that area.
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