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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Proposal for src files
 At 11:22 01/04/98 -0600, W. Eliot Kimber wrote: >But maybe I'm just a crank. No. But you have a level of vision and understanding that makes it difficult for others like me to follow. This is a recurring theme in the whole of current IT/CS - there are 'right' solutions that people simply are not able to comprehend or find too difficult to adopt. In those cases one ends up with a small number of people who provide a solution (often at high cost) to a large number of people who don't understand an don't own it. IMO the single most important thing about XML is that it makes things accessible to at least a hundred times more people than other technologies. We are seeing this debate frequently now - 'what does XML do that XYZ doesn't?' My answer is that it can relate to ordinary hackers - and possibly even to inspired management. >At 09:22 AM 4/1/98, Peter Murray-Rust wrote: >><PROPOSAL> >>Is it possible to combine these two so that we express a DTD in a standard >>XML notation? Many of us do this already, but I suspect that our tagset and >>syntax vary. If we could agree on this - and I don't see this as >>technically difficult - we could help both communities. > >It is not technically difficult--it is, however, practically impossible >except in the most trivial way (a direct transliteration of DTD syntax) I was thinking of something very trivial (you didn't expect anything else from me, surely :-) - a lossless translation of DTD to XML format (and vice versa) without any inheritance, mapping, etc. I thought this was uncontroversial - but maybe I haven't got my point over. >unless it is *explicitly* defined as a base architecture with very clear >rules for specialization. And even then, developing that architecture will >be difficult at best. > >The reason it's practically impossible is because getting agreement among a >community of interest as wide and varried as the XML community on a subject >of such importance as how to represent the definitions of document types is >one of the hardest types of things there is to do. There are simply too I wasn't trying to tackle this. We already *have* a definition of document types - it's XML 1.0. I was simply suggesting we standardised an XML-based syntactic representation of this. >many different ways to do it, too many different ways to represent things, >too many interested parties. The degree of expressibility of schemas is >open ended, meaning that any design, to be useful, must be maximally >extensible. Defining extensible languages is hard. > >I personally think that trying to define a common markup approach to DTD >representation is a waste of time: the answer is either obvious (Wayne >Wohler did it over 5 years ago) or impossible to achieve consensus on. The If it's obvious and already done, perhaps it should be re-used? >first is not useful compared to the cost of defining and maintaining it, >the second cannot be achieved by any sort of consensus-based approach. So >there's no point in bothering. > >The minimum abstractions needed to define element types are already defined >by the SGML property set--if your schema language can get you to these >abstractions, fine. Perhaps all we need is a representation of the property set in XML format. Would *that* be controversial? > >I say let groups define their own schema approaches without bothering to >find too wide of a consensus. If one particular approach gains widespread >acceptance, then fine. If it doesn't, we're no worse off than we were >before, *but* we haven't wasted a huge amount of a scarse resource on a >doomed effort. This provides opportunities for vendors to distinguish Although I value your judgement, I don't see why this is 'doomed'. The same could have been said about SAX. I'm proposing that we take simple steps to see if there is a communality here that we can use. I am not enthralled by suggested that we let anyone do whatever they like. We can then guarantee that whenever we encounter a foreign schema it will be another significant task to understand and code it. This would - as I suggested - simple move the 'battleground' from tags to schemas. We have avoided having parser wars with SAX and DOM - couldn't we at least look at schemas? I agree resource is scarce. I think SAX showed an excellent way of conserving such resource. If we followed the same process we might find out at an early stage whether we were doomed or not :-) >themselves by providing different types of validation and constraint >support. As long as they always support normal DTD syntax, I see that as a >good thing--if someone like Microsoft produces a product that helps me >create better data repositories, then I'm happy to buy and use it, as long >it accepts and generates normal DTDs with the level of fidelity I require. >But why should I give Microsoft (or anyone else) free engineering support >by being involved in a schema development effort? It doesn't make sense to We gave them (and lots of others) free engineering support for SAX. I put a lot of effort into that and I'm not complaining :-) Actually even just for me, the effort was less than writing APIs for every parser. Multiply that by 10000... >me. If they want my help, they can pay me. I already have what I want and >need and I'm capable of providing for myself if I need more (as is anyone >with a copy of Lark and a Java book). I'm afraid I (and I think many others) aren't :-) and that is why I raised the problem. Being a part-time academic who does XML in their spare time I don't have the resources of a commercial company - and I suspect there are many others in a 'similar' position. They will come across 'schemas', 'src' files, etc. and need to know what to do with them. I hope we have a more constructive message than simply "wait and see what the large commercial organisations do, and then buy their products" :-). The WWW grew in large part through the efforts of large numbers of large number of people who picked up a common philosophy and developed it. If the message now is that "unless you are a member of W3C you shouldn't be involved in XML development" it represents the passing of an era, and I'll need to rethink. 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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