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Re: W3C Successes (RE: W3C Culture and Aims )

• Subject: Re: W3C Successes (RE: W3C Culture and Aims )
• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 15:07:05 -0700
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• References: <83MKKG4252B7A6MKXRJG7H9XSJEJ.3cc72253@MChamp> <f5by9fc7ohh.fsf@c...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020310

Henry S. Thompson wrote:

> Um, as regards XML, you're joking, right?  Look at the history.  It's
> _completely_ unlike HTML, it was way out ahead of what any vendors
> were thinking about, much less trying-and-failing to interoperate.  It 
> was in fact a lot like XSLT and XML Schema:  real new science was done 
> in the WGs.

Er, I don't see it that way.  We took the 5% of SGML that was widely 
used, threw away the rest, insisted on using URIs for external 
reference, and allowed skipping the DTD.  The only really significant 
new items were, I think:

- draconian error-handling
- rigid insistence on Unicode chars and nothing but
- the encoding signaling trick

Not much new science there.  I also think that the W3C excels when it 
formalizes what has already been proven to work. -Tim

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: W3C Successes (RE: W3C Culture and Aims )
    • From: ht@c... (Henry S. Thompson)
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    • From: "Don Park" <donpark@d...>

• References:
  • W3C Successes (RE: W3C Culture and Aims )
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
  • Re: W3C Successes (RE: W3C Culture and Aims )
    • From: ht@c... (Henry S. Thompson)

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