[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML complexity, namespaces (was WG)
On Thu, Mar 18, 1999 at 08:52:24PM -0600, Paul Prescod wrote: > 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. 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. > > If we were doing that now it would be much, much easier because we would > use Jade. That proves that technology improves and it becomes easier to do > hard things over time which is pretty much unrelated to the distinction > between SGML and XML. There is a very well known phrase: "Nothing is worth more than what people will pay for it." Paul here is essentially saying the same thing: "Nothing is more complex than the amount effort it takes to build and use it." The perceived complexity of SGML is not dependent on how complex it is to implement an SGML parser, since one already exists. What matters is how complex it is to use. If one were to insist on considering the underlying technology in determining the complexity one would be forced to concede that a hello world program written in C is enormously complex since it involves compilers, file systems, advanced virtual memory architectures, windowing systems, possibly network based windowing protocols such as X, virtual machines, OS kernels and much, much more, in order to convert the contents of a C source file into a pattern of light and dark phosphors on a CRT. [The obvious caveat is if one cannot use the available technology for whatever reasons. In this case, implementing the subsystem is clearly part of the cost. In the case of SP, however, very few people will have reason to do their own work: SP is free and usable in commercial software.] Cheers, Marcelo -- http://www.simdb.com/~marcelo/ 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/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 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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