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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Article: Keeping pace with James Clark
 True and true. But this outlines an important point: when it came time to use SGMLS in production, the ESIS stuff was invisible to the authors. They saw the error messages. Understanding ESIS did not help them debug the SGML. Grosso explained the ESIS to me and that was for me, also, a nice aha moment, but it also seemed trivial, as if, ok, that's what I expected it to do, so? moment. A parser feeding an application through a clean data model delights a programmer; a validator that clearly indicates what is wrong in the markup at what line in the text delights an author. Who do you love? XML has almost single handedly given markup the reputation of being "computer friendly and author unfriendly". Why? SGML was actually friendlier to authors and hard on the programmers. We know why. It isn't always a good thing to insist on the programmer as the primary beneficiary. HTML succeeded and continues to thrive because it is friendly to the author. XHTML is stricter, cleaner, and wallowing. Why? There is something to the saying that the middle class never give up their vices. len -----Original Message----- From: Sean McGrath [mailto:sean.mcgrath@p...] [Len Bullard] >I liked his reference to sgmls. He is right >about the redoing of ARCSGML being a seminal >event. OTOH, ARCSGML had better error messages. >There are some things lawyers do better than >programmers. :-) Ah, but the key thing about sgmls was that it emitted a simple, line-oriented implementation of ESIS - an infoset. I would argue that sgmls's crowning achievement was to add the infoset to SGMLs core from a programmers perspective and then expose it in a very programmer friendly way. This was the biggest "aha!" moment of my markup career when it dawned on me that the parser allowed me to think purely in terms of a hierarchical data-model view of the world and ignore syntax. <Detail> Although technically speaking, ESIS is abstract and the line-oriented notation produced by sgmls (and nsgmls, (and PYX)) are purely James's invention, many serious dollars worth of production code is based on it and the term ESIS has become essentially synonymous with James's notation for it. </Detail> Sean ----------------------------------------------------------------- The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org>, an initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org> The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription manager: <http://lists.xml.org/ob/adm.pl> 
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