[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML syntax (was Re: external subset syntax)
At 20:31 16/12/97 +0100, james anderson wrote: [... lots of "why?" appeals about XML ...] james - and others. i have enormous sympathy with your position. i have a somewhat unique role being an SGML-near-illiterate and yet being part of the SIG (was WG) process. i can't divulge any of the last 4 months material - it's confidential; the earlier stuff is archived. however i think it's allowable to say that enormous care has gone into this process. for example the case-sensitivity involved a huge amount of discussion with expert knowledge of many non-anglophone countries. similarly the DTD-stuff has had a huge amount of discussion. my own naive questioning about whitespace generated a large amount of material. what i have come to accept from a year on the SIG (was WG) is the precision of the process and the need for discipline. i - as do many SIG members - raise things they don't feel happy about, but when they are decided agree to try to make them work. my own personal concerns are littered publicly on XML-DEV :-). like you i find the different syntaxes very tedious because JUMBO has to read and parse both. of course i really enjoy writing parsers especially past midnight, and the best bit is tracking down the bugs, but others are different. so i sigh, and hack it. fwiw i translate all the non-XML syntax into XML internally because XML is superb to work with. (if anyone hasn't discovered that yet, it's because they don't have a full xml system.) xml is incredible. i can do things with JUMBO in a few hours that would have taken months before. it is very tough to have to ask you to take this on trust - i understand. at least i have had my say - or shout - and accept that i *have* shouted where necessary. *everything* has been listened to - not a sparrow chirps without the WG taking it on board (or some other poetic phrase - i probably misquote). it's important to realise that xml is part of a historical process. it was by no means certain that by 1997q4 we should have xml hyped throughout the world. it wouldn't have happened without a *huge* effort from the sgml community and we have them to thank. if, as a result, we have sgml-compatibility in xml that is an acceptable price for me. what i *hope* is that as a community we make the job of writing parsers as easy as possible. to do this we need APIs, communal libraries, test data, etc. so james(a) should be able to borrow a DTD-parser *off the shelf* in which case it's no big deal. p. Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic net connection VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg 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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