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On Sun, 2021-07-25 at 12:00 -0400, Arjun Ray wrote: > > si As a matter of fact, > I don't know of any further TCs to ISO 8879 after the WebSGML TC in > 1996, despite the official 5-year cycle for such reviews. So a lot > of this discussion is ultimately of archaeological value only... If there were i never heard about them. Software vendors in the SGML world mostly hated the complexity and were eager to see WebSGML. Atone point minimization was responsible for (an estimate done at the time, but based on some logging and monitoring) soe 80% of our supports costs for Author/Edtor at SoftQuad. Of course, once you loaded a document and exported it back out, the minimization was all gone. The biggest shift in moving from SGML to XML (for those of us who did it) was, i think, a different view of the markup. SGML was essentially a macro text-processing language. XML was a document interchange format. This is why XSD is important - you get type annotations on the parse tree so e.g. a database can store floating point numbers as native floats and process them massively faster. And unlike RNG, XSD guarantees determinism, so you know which element will get which type. Internal text entities for Unicode? Probably you're in the 0.01% of users. Just insert the characters. Speed of parsing? If that's a real issue these days (and i know it is for some organizations), consider server-side parsing with EXI. In-place parsing isn't going to fly in a world with XInclude, nor for that matter with NFC normalization. If we have problems with XML, for the most part they are historical - people who were forced to the the XML DOM in a junior job and now their foreheads are caved in from all the head-banging. Sometimes a few lines of XQuery can replace hundreds of lines of DOM code. People who learned to hate XML: Ian Hickson (hixie) when he was editing HTML 5 described himself as being allergic to any spec with an X in its name. Part of that is the "enterprise/corporate" feel that is thught negative by the open source Web crowd. There are many more examples. Personally i'd be mre interested in a mini-xsd language that also was useful for JSON, and had both XML and JSON syntax, than an attempt to redo XML for a market that doesn't want it. XML is already more complex than is useful. But we're stuck with it. That needn't be a problem, though. Go read the ASCII spec and tell me exactly when SOH and SYN must be used and why. Actually don't, because i know what they are :-) but the point is, even though there is still an archway over the North-East door into the cathedral, it's been bricked up for centuries and no-one uses it. MicroXML was an attempt to make a subset, but it's too small and also is incompatible, so you can't just use it with XML parsers and have the rest of the stack work unchanged [1]. So why bother with it? It died, as far as i can tell. If there's a way forward it's neither in re-inventing lower layers no in mourning the past. It's finding new use cases for what we have, and new ways of working that have clear benefits for large groups of people who know who they are and how this can help them. (but it can still be fun to listen in to the conversation - thanks!) Best, Liam [1] microXML doesn't do attribute normalization -- Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/ Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/ XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting. Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations: http://www.fromoldbooks.org
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