[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: groves dissent (was RE: RFC: Attributes and XML-RPC)
[Gregg Reynolds:] > In a word, [the grove paradigm] takes what is basically pretty > simple - an attributed tree - and turns it into something of > surpassing obscurity. You're entitled to your opinion. How would you prefer to walk an "attributed tree"? (And what is an "attributed tree"?) > But "the grove model" isn't even necessary. The thing it tries to > model can be modeled quite adequately without any invented terms or > concepts. I don't think there's anything really new in groves, except possibly the (admittedly terrible) GROVE acronym itself. How would you model the thing that groves model? Remember the requirements: it has to be a machine-processable formal model, and it has to cover the whole territory of information resources, not just XML resources, and make every component addressable. > But not all great experiments succeed, and groves/DSSSL/Hytime have > failed in the marketplace for good reasons, and that should guide us > in building XML. Let's leave DSSSL out of this. To lump DSSSL with groves and HyTime does a disservice to all three. DSSSL does not describe the grove paradigm, it only uses it to describe the result of parsing an SGML document, by means of the SGML Property Set. If the source of all you know about groves is the DSSSL standard, then you don't know groves. And what were those "good reasons" for which groves and HyTime "failed"? It looks to me like the primary reasons for HyTime's lack of mass acceptance, to date, have been the lack of a general toolkit implementation, and public ignorance of the problem space in which HyTime offers solutions. Both of these problems are rapidly being resolved now, so I think the death-knell of HyTime is still being rung prematurely. People ridiculed HyTime's complexity, but then they had to come up with a way to implement extended linking. And that led to the realization that the DOM has no foundation -- it was not, in fact, an object model. And that led to the XML infoset activity. Now W3C is at the same point the creators of HyTime were, after they discovered the need for an SGML Property Set, but before they understood that the ability to express the SGML Property Set depended on yet another needed invention, an invention that turned out to be the grove paradigm. Slowly but inexorably, the XML world is re-inventing HyTime. We still don't have an official XML infoset (read: XML Property Set). We still don't have an official XLink, or an official XML addressing notation. Directly comparable features for SGML have all been standardized in HyTime and in industrial use for years. While HyTime's complexity has been castigated by the Web people, HyTime has been quietly working. Can it be that the real reason we don't have an official XLink yet is that the complexity of the real requirements that XLink must meet is beyond what can be accepted by the Web community? Or perhaps it's because XLink, at the power level that HyTime provides for it, would make RDF a completely unnecessary and much weaker alternative? Or perhaps it's because lots of people think that their own ideas about metadata architecture should become world standards, instead of allowing metadata architecture to be as powerful, arbitrary, and flexible as any other XML information architecture? That's what HyTime does. -Steve -- Steven R. Newcomb, President, TechnoTeacher, Inc. srn@t... http://www.techno.com ftp.techno.com voice: +1 972 231 4098 fax +1 972 994 0087 pager (150 characters max): srn-page@t... 3615 Tanner Lane Richardson, Texas 75082-2618 USA 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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