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Re: SGML, XML and SML

• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• To: Sean McGrath <digitome@i...>, xml-dev@i...
• Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1999 07:28:53 -0800

At 09:24 AM 11/22/99 +0000, Sean McGrath wrote:
>OK. I see where you are coming from. My position is this:-
>1) SML must be allowed to be born so that it can either
>die of natural causes or flourish. 
>2) SML must be a subset (application profile) of XML.

And SML must not claim, explicitly or implicitly, to "be XML".  SML
may or may not be a good idea.  It would certainly be a bad idea
to give lazy vendors a trapdoor so they could run around announcing
"we support XML" while also rejecting XML 1.0 documents that don't
happen to conform to this subset.  Also bad to give arrogant 
I-don't-mess-with-other-peoples-code junior programmers an excuse to 
write their own partial parsers for fun thus wasting everyone's time and 
money.

XML ain't perfect, but at this point it has pretty darn good 
interoperability.  Messing that up would be a blunder of historic
proportions.

I would urge W3C to defend its copyright on the name "XML" quite
vigorously in this scenario.

>3) To quote Henry Thompson (I think) "We should stop worrying
>and learn to love xLink". 

Speaking as the long-suffering co-chair of XLink, I predict that we're
finally going to get that job done in the immediate future.  And I think
Henry (if it was him) has a point. -Tim

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