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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" myth come from?
 On Sun, 06 Feb 2005 08:47:32 -0700, Uche Ogbuji <Uche.Ogbuji@f...> wrote: > > If you insist on this "hand-written XML is obsolete" theory enough to > use it as a case for focusing XML 2.0 on toolkits, you're going to have > to come up with a lot of evidence to back up your dubious claim. I didn't say "obsolete", I said it's not the mainstream use case for XML I see. XML 1.0 appears to have included a lot of stuff to make it easier to hand author, and in my non-expert opinion is that stuff seems to be causing a disproportionate amount of the pain for developers. I'm not presenting that as a conclusion that I wish to defend, just a reason for being interested in a profile of XML that is focused more on the feature that are most valuable to the mainstream. The point that hand-authored XML may be a small percentage of the volume but it is more important as assets in the typical system is a very interesting one that I'll have to think about. I wouldn't even begin to dispute that this was true in the early days, but I think XML is pretty well bootstrapped now. The text format that allows "hand" tweaking and debugging is definitely a key part of XML's value, but that's not what I'm talking about. My personal preference (really a best guess, since I haven't tried to really design or prototype it) would be to remove DTDs and maybe some other bits such as the highly confusing whitespace rules, CDATA sections ... out of the XML *core* and put them in some spec that governs what a preprocessor would do to turn that syntax sugar into the minimized core syntax, e.g. translate character entities into Unicode, escape the individual characters that need to be escaped inside a CDATA section, etc. I have no desire to make the syntax sugar obsolete, I just don't see a long-term value for baking it into the very core of what XML is. People who find that stuff useful for hand-authoring or vendors who need backwards compatibility with SGML and XML 1.x can stick with it, fine with me, they just would have to use the preprocessor along with a hypothetical "XML--" processor in their work. Again, I don't really know if this would improve the REAL value of XML or just its geek appeal to me. I think that's an open question, and I freely admit that we all have different takes on this from our work experience. The reason I babble about this is to stimulate feedback from others so as to get a balanced perspective. 
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