[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] (My) Feeling About SML
I've been mulling over this whole SML/XML discussion, trying to get things straight in my head, and a decent summary. I thought I'd share what I've concluded so far. Heres where I'm at currently: I'm not sure that parser speed/size is that much of an issue, even for handheld devices, and if it is I think thats the sort of problem thats likely to disappear quite quickly. Having an alternate markup language (SML/WML) is likely to cause problems later which are best avoided - limitations in computer processing power tend to go away very quickly. I'm also not convinced about the issues raised about simplifying message passing for EDI and/or handhelds - as you can achieve this with a suitably specified specification between the parties involved. I've posted to this effect already. So it seems to come down to complexity of the XML spec itself, and that its hard to grok all the subtleties. Now this I can understand (!) as I don't come from a markup background. However it seems that this could be largely addressed with simpler APIs, and better documentation? I can also understand that specifying the required (XML) feature subset of a document would be useful. Especially if specs start appearing which start saying "thou shalt not use ..." - the processor will need programmatic access to this information, especially if we start to consider compound documents and/or XML fragments. Again, however this 'required feature subset' is handled, it doesn't necessarily mean that the XML 1.0 spec needs revision, it can be layered on top of it. Or am I wrong? An example : We've got some developers here who are starting to get into XML development, and I've fielded a few questions - particularly regarding well-formedness, validity, and the DOM API. The first two were relatively easy to answer. Most of the rest of the confusion seemed to be at the (DOM) API level - these developers have been given an XML message format spec (which doesn't use any XML nastiness) and just need to start writing some code against it. So this leads me to the conclusion that a simplified API, perhaps coupled with a means to define the XML feature subset of a schema would address 99% of the issues raised thus far. But I keep getting the niggly feeling that I'm missing something. Any comments? L. ================================================================== "Never Do With More, What Can Be Achieved With Less" ---William of Occam ================================================================== Leigh Dodds Eml: ldodds@i... ingenta ltd Tel: +44 1225 826619 BUCS Building, University of Bath Fax: +44 1225 826283 HomePage : http://www.bath.ac.uk/~ccslrd/ WebLog : http://weblogs.userland.com/eclectic/ ================================================================== 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 unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe 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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