[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: DTD invented by Microsoft?!
As someone who is not used to write DTDs, I appreciate the simplifications proposed by Henry Thompson. With XML, less is more. So, for example, I can see why constraining XML documents to be trees is better than allowing people to encode arbitrary object graphs. Isn't XML and its extensions to become "SGML for the masses, without DTDs"? If you keep a gentle learning curve for people to create new tags, I am sure the popularity of XML will spread like wildfire. I apologize if this comment might seem misplaced, but if one has to learn full-blown SGML syntax and how to write DTDs, then most people who are afraid to get into SGML now (and are currently occasional users of SGML w/o dwelling into DTDs) will be also afraid to work with XML. I am a little bit confused about how much power of expression should XML have. If an XML document encodes detailed semantics about how to process its elements, like a full blown programming language, and you have to use an IDL for it, isn't XML competing with distributed object communication (e.g., CORBA), and distributed object databases (e.g., ObjectStore) but much less efficient (requiring parsing to communicate with objects, rather than calling the objects' methods directly)? How does all this fit together? Shouldn't XML be specialized to expose just enough of the semantics necessary to improve indexing, searching, and multi-modal display of Web documents? Giovanni Flammia flammia@s... begin: vcard fn: Giovanni Flammia n: Flammia;Giovanni org: MIT LCS Spoken Language Systems email;internet: flammia@s... title: Mr. note: Ciao x-mozilla-cpt: ;0 x-mozilla-html: TRUE end: vcard
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