[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: It's time for practical XML!
Ron Bourret wrote: > > Overlapping proposals are an unfortunate reality of working out "standards". It > is easy to think of XML, XLink, namespaces, etc. as having been handed down from > on high, but I have no doubts that the process was just as messy as what you see > now in the schema arena -- witness the overhauls of namespaces and XSL, for > example. The only difference is whose efforts are overlapping and how public > the process is. There are some differences. First, XML wasn't handed down from on high as you note. It is the culmination of almost two decades of effort on SGML and then HyTime just as XSL is informed by DSSSL. XML inherits much. Some very dedicated people have invested a good portion of their professional careers in markup technologies. The successes of SGML in making it possible to create and maintain very large document repositories informed the fairly short transition into XML. These efforts were maintained by professional standards organizations that operated according to processes informed by decades of experience in creating international standards. Overlapping efforts are a fact of life, but under the processes of say, ISO, these are curtailed to the degree possible by the charters of the working groups. So, no the processes are not usually as messy. But the messiness here is due in part to the use of the Internet and mail lists. IMHO, this also has enabled more people better access to the standards making process. Because of this, the speed with which a standard can emerge and vanish has increased. This is a somewhat new game. The players are learning how and the processes are maturing. Probably the most challenging area for XML is the role it plays as a meta language among application languages which do not share its foundation in a syntax-based specification. The discussion of property sets which emerged from the many years of trying to meet the issues in SGML should be considered because all of the Internet languages whose applications must interoperate are affected. XML, indeed, markup in general cannot solve the problems of interoperation nor can virtual machine based programming languages. Len Bullard IPS 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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