[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Apologia pro vita mea (was: XML-DEV as virtual community)
Peter Murray-Rust wrote: > It's interesting that many of > the people involved are quite distinct from those involved in SAX. I think > this represents an influx of talent that may have come from the non-SGML > community and in this sense it may bring fresh insights. As one of those folks from the non-SGML community, let me document my involvement with XML. I hope that this will provide a sample of where the "influx of talent" is coming from. I was helping to design a project, the details of which I can't reveal, but which involved various communicating processes. Other team members had sketched out rough syntaxes for the basic message format. One was a classic binary format with explicit length words, absolute byte offsets within the message, and no thought given to endianism issues. The other was a classic comma-separated, double-quote-employing, backslash-escaping plain text design. I looked at these two and blurted, "Aren't these rather archaic? What about XML?" At that point I knew almost nothing about XML except that it was SGML--, and nothing about SGML except that it was the foundation of HTML. On this project it happened that new ideas were important, for non-technical reasons. The team leader told me to go forth and learn, which I have done. The project has been handed off to an implementation group and now lives in Approval Limbo, but I'm still learning XML. I've prepared a presentation on XML for my company, which I hope to be able to make public later on. > [1] The infrastructure of the Web (e.g. the protocols) is , of course, very > carefully regulated and cannot vary. It corresponds to the basic machinery > of any organism - essentially all use the same genetic code. But above that > there is great flexibility. Actually, the protocols vary more than you may think, and by much the same Darwinian process. Efforts are now underway to revise the very format of email messages (with plenty of respect for backward compatibility, never fear), and of course TCP/IP has already been revised, though the new version is not yet in widespread use. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@c... You tollerday donsk? N. You tolkatiff scowegian? Nn. You spigotty anglease? Nnn. You phonio saxo? Nnnn. Clear all so! 'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5) 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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