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Re: patterns vs. identifiers

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: patterns vs. identifiers
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 09:35:44 -0400
• In-reply-to: <200208201429.35571.miles@m...>

> Simon St.Laurent wrote,
> > To put it another more amusing way, RDF is inhuman.  XML at least
> > tries to balance human and computer approaches to information.  Then
> > Namespaces in XML came along - oh, the humanity!
> 
> I'm obviously missing something, because of the ten design goals
> listed at the the top of the XML REC only one, "XML documents should
> be human-legible and reasonably clear", speaks to humanity. The bulk
> of the remainder address automated processing and the needs of
> programmers.

I read the other goals as ensuring that developers can create parsers
for XML, not as ensuring that markup should be useful to programmers.

Just for the sake of repeating them:
---------------------------------------
   1. XML shall be straightforwardly usable over the Internet.
   2. XML shall support a wide variety of applications.
   3. XML shall be compatible with SGML.
   4. It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents.
   5. The number of optional features in XML is to be kept to the
absolute minimum, ideally zero.
   6. XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear.
   7. The XML design should be prepared quickly.
   8. The design of XML shall be formal and concise.
   9. XML documents shall be easy to create.
  10. Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.
--------------------------------------

None of those suggest to me that the XML WG set out to produce, for
instance, RDF.


-------------
Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA
http://simonstl.com may be my URI
http://monasticxml.org may be my ascetic URI
urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether

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    • From: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>

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    • From: Miles Sabin <miles@m...>

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