[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Scripting and XML
> From: Simon St.Laurent <SimonStL@c...> > It seems like the complexities of SGML that XML stripped away are still > haunting XML. Of course. But I think we should be aware that SGML came at the end of perhaps a fifteen year develop project involving thousands of documents at IBM and other places. So XML is the result of 25 years of continuous development. I think humility should make those of us with substantially less experience (time-wise and scale-wise) be careful not to label as irrelevant or excessive any SGML feature that we have not personally seen the need for! Which is not to say we cannot fruitfully bitch and clamour for what we need for own tasks, of course:-) That we all could have done it ever so much better goes without saying. If you are interested in improving SGML (which can flow through into XML) then contact ANSI or your local standards organisation and becoem part of the process. If you are interested in improving XML (which can flow through into SGML) then I guess join W3C or be vocal on this group! However, I think the XML 1.0 design is pretty much stabilized now. > Excellent. Now we know what the SGML developers were thinking - now we just > need to figure out why this is relevant to XML. Why is it so difficult to > create CDATA elements - which have to be marked clearly in XML by start and > end tags? It may be helpful to clarify what "Language" in SGML and XML means: it is not "something with a grammar" but "something directly readable by humans and editable with plain text editors". In other words, there can be no "binary" markup in SGML documents. So any solution to embed binary indexes to ends of binary sections is not SGML, because it is not human readable on a simple text editor. (It is just a fancy data storage format. I think the HyTime sBento provides a high-level interface to data storage of this kind, so you can use these from within SGML/XML and still be ISO standard, by the way. ) > There is no need in XML to stop CDATA at just any </ sequence, just > the </ sequence which turns into the full end tag of the element. Of course, > this would probably break compatibility with all my favorite SGML parsers, at > least if I wrote scripts that used </ at some point If your favourite parser is conforming to SGML (e.g. SP, OmniMark) then it will treat the CDATA as stopping when it finds any "</" followed by any NAMESTART character, whether or not the character is the start of the current element's type-name or not. This is because SGML allows you to omit tags in many circumstances: this is familiar from HTML (except that vendors implement their own minimiation systems in their editors which currently I am so mad at, because I have to re-mark up a few hundred pages because a highly regarded HTML editor completely stuffed up all my nice markup, rrrr: I am sure if the programmers knew how much difficulty they cause by their brilliant proprietary ideas they would resign in shame as *HOPELESS HACKERS*). XML does not allow you to omit any tags. XML does not do any context checking, as far as well-formedness. Rick Jelliffe xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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