[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Parents and children (was RFD: comp.text.xml)
From: Paul Prescod <papresco@t...> > XML inherits 95% of everything that made SGML difficult >to apply and use...The flexibility, the dangerous parameter entities, the >responsibility for defining your own tags, your own stylesheets and your >own systems. The responsibility to define standards and stick to them. The >perceived and real need to bend them. It's all there. I think this is a good point. Markup languages have to cope with text--it is a different world to tagging nice simple fielded records of databases. People who are coming to text new usually have no idea the enormous richness of text--standard generalized markup languages (i.e. XML aka SGML) attempt to provide a very simple mechanism to cope with it--an element hierarchy with attributes and ID/IDREFs to allow graph structures to be represented. But the richness of text, and the sophistication of what people want to do with it, means that a simple tool like a standard generalized markup language makes many problems tractable but still not simple. People will blame the tool (XML), but the enemy is text itself. Anyway, people have trouble with standards (e.g. look at all the W3C applications which give a puported EBNF syntax), with the generalized approach (e.g. that famous web page "The Web is ruined and I ruined it"--sorry no URL), with markup (e.g. those who want documents to be embedded in programming languages) and with languages (e.g. the people who want to use a binary format for everything because of sometimes misplaced notions of efficiency). People already baulk at each of these 4 issues, sometimes appropriately, sometimes inappropriately. These central issues are much more important than the readability or implementability of ISO 8879 versus REC-XML. No matter how simple XML became, IMHO people will still resist buying into XML's standard generalized markup langage approach. In the Byte issue about XML, Gates says something about XML being preferred for the moment. So from their top we can see that Microsoft has not bought into XML as a strategy, but just as a tactic. The RDF people still see XML as a serialization format, which suggests that they may see DOM as more important than XML. So I think we should not fool ourselves that XML's future is assured. People who have not grown used them often have a mental block against standard generalized markup languages and always wish they would go away in favour of semi-proprietary, low-level, procedural, binary formats. 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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