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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML complexity, namespaces (was WG)
Paul Prescod writes:
> Richard Goerwitz wrote:
> >
> > I come from a small shop that does a lot of SGML work. Trust me:
> > SGML is complex and intractable.
>
> <RANT>
> This is way off topic but I must admit that these characterizations really
> annoy me.
>
> I can only speak anecdotally: I started using SGML while working
> for a professor of English as an undergrad. A single programmer
> (not me) wrote a pretty sophisticated application that converted
> SGML to HTML and RTF in a couple of months -- almost exactly the
> same amount of time it would take to do the same for XML.
Actually, many such applications were often written in a few days or
even a few hours. The interesting thing about SGML is that it was
heavily used in two separate markets at extreme ends of the scale:
1. academia, for large, low-budget projects using free software (like
Emacs, NSGMLS, Perl, and Jade) or cheap software (like WP7); and
2. government/military/heavy-industry, for large, high-budget projects
using extremely expensive commercial software (like ArborText and
Omnimark).
In general, the academic projects (and there are hundreds of them)
accomplished much more using much less (often just a single PC on a
grad student's desk), but that is partly because they never had to
become too user friendly -- the researchers would work directly with
SGML markup, rather than hiding it behind $20K/seat GUI tools. The
gov/mil/industry projects spent most of the money trying to hide the
SGML from view -- the processing itself has never been difficult, SGML
or XML.
What SGML missed was the middle part of the document market -- the
$1M-$100M/year companies who couldn't afford all of the customised
user-friendly tools, but didn't have the free time or initiative to
support and maintain their own custom installations.
> The process was almost identical too: you use a parser from James
> Clark, pump the data into your favorite scripting language and
> output it in the other language. The complexity of the input syntax
> was and is irrelevant to solving that problem.
Almost correct. One expensive disadvantage of SGML (until WebSGML) is
that it requires full DTD conformance at every stage of production; as
a result, if your production chain consists of ten physical steps,
writing out SGML at each stage, you *must* have DTDs for all of the
intermediate steps. This one constraint can add $100K or more to a
large enterprise SGML project, since DTD writers are expensive to hire
(and a single, configured DTD becomes heavily obfuscated so that it
can almost never be maintained in-house).
All the best,
David
--
David Megginson david@m...
http://www.megginson.com/
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