[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: SGML, XML and SML

  • From: kragen@p... (Kragen Sitaker)
  • To: xml-dev@i...
  • Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1999 16:54:17 -0500 (EST)

sml concatenate
Don Park writes:
> SML is a subset of XML and is not to be considered, in any sense,
> as conforming to the full XML 1.0 specification.
> 
> If you have better wordings, I'll be obliged.  It is not my
> intention to sabotage XML in-flight.

Usually, when people talk about languages in set-theoretic terms, they
are referring to the sets of strings that belong to the languages.  If
language A is a subset of language B, that means every string that is a
valid sentence (or document, or program, or whatever) in language A is
also valid in language B.  Usually they also mean that strings valid in
both languages have the same meanings in both.

Obviously there are SML "documents" that are not valid XML documents,
such as "<x/><y/>", so the first sense doesn't apply.  I'm not clear
about whether the second applies or not.

You might mean that the specification of SML consists of pieces of the
specification of XML, but that's not true either.

Perhaps you could say SML is a simplified version of XML.

Also, a nitpick: language specifications don't conform to the XML spec,
unless they are written in XML; XML documents do.  Perhaps you should
say that SML documents do not necessarily conform to the XML
specification.

A note: I am enthusiastic about the idea of a stream-based XML
variant.  I've always thought of it as a flaw that XML documents cannot
concatenate to form other XML documents -- i.e. XML is not closed under
concatenation -- and, due to the fact that <?xml version="1.0"?> is not
a PI, you can't include an arbitrary XML document inside another XML
document -- another flaw, in my view.

I think it would be very nice, from a processing point of view, to have
an XML variant that didn't have CDATA sections or DTDs (although entity
definitions are useful!).  I suspect CDATA sections are hard to live
without if you're writing XML documents about HTML or XML, though.

-- 
<kragen@p...>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
The Internet stock bubble didn't burst on 1999-11-08.  Hurrah!
<URL:http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/bubble.html>


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...)



PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!

Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced!

Buy Stylus Studio Now

Download The World's Best XML IDE!

Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today!

Don't miss another message! Subscribe to this list today.
Email
First Name
Last Name
Company
Subscribe in XML format
RSS 2.0
Atom 0.3
 

Stylus Studio has published XML-DEV in RSS and ATOM formats, enabling users to easily subcribe to the list from their preferred news reader application.


Stylus Studio Sponsored Links are added links designed to provide related and additional information to the visitors of this website. they were not included by the author in the initial post. To view the content without the Sponsor Links please click here.

Site Map | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Trademarks
Free Stylus Studio XML Training:
W3C Member
Stylus Studio® and DataDirect XQuery ™are products from DataDirect Technologies, is a registered trademark of Progress Software Corporation, in the U.S. and other countries. © 2004-2013 All Rights Reserved.