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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: SML (was Elliotte Rusty Harold on Web Services)
 From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...> > Rick, of course, was an early critic of efforts to subset XML: > http://www.xml.com/pub/a/1999/12/sml/goldilocks.html I don't think I have changed my position: I was not against SML as merely an "effort to subset XML" but as an antagonistic, premature, dogma-driven exercise in reductionism whose end result could only be to get rid of everything, as in XML 2.0alpha. And one that diverted peoples attention from the looming XML Schemas: a real source of complication.[1] I think there were five tendencies at work in SML that doomed it despite the talent of those involved and their level of concern: a naive view of where the costs of parsing lies, reductionism (the failure to value that a limited redundancy or sugar or lubrication in a language increases its usefulness), a related belief that anything that can be layered should be layered (ignoring the issue of how a document should declare or specify this layering), an Americanist tendency that if what is good for them will have to be good enough for everyone else, and the lack of agreed requirements. Furthermore, the mental furniture of infoset versus syntax was not available at that time. As I finished: "So I think that if SML has a future, it may be in the area of closed data transport and interprocess communication, where it is generated by API, and where human reader/writers do not touch it. But that area is the one that binary formats poach easily..." E.g. SOAP On Sun, Feb 02, 2003 at 08:10:59AM -0700, Uche Ogbuji wrote: > I won't dwell on the fact that when the "efficient buffered parser" claim came > up here a little while back, the claimants were not able to make a convincing > case. Actually, I think that is a little too strong. I think we only demonstrated there seemed at least one way to implement it efficiently. It is fair enough that a programmer would prefer to do things in a straigthforward incremental way, doing elements first then tacking on entity references at the end of a project, given the lowly status of entities around the place. This would be a fault of rational but wrong expectations (that the element tree is the skeleton rather than the flesh) instead of any kind of incompetence. Cheers Rick Jelliffe [1] http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail-archive/xml-dev/xml-dev-Nov-1999/0365.html 
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