[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] SML Status Report
Quite a few people have been asking me about the status of SML. This is a status report on the SML effort and the group behind it, the SML-DEV. So far, we achieved tentative concensus on following issues: SML is a strict subset of XML SML supports: UTF-8 and UTF-16 only. empty elements. numeric character entities. predefined character entities. SML does not support: DTD CDATA sections XML and text declarations Processing Instructions Comments Entities (except character entities) SML attribute names must not conflict with child element names. We are currently trying to formulate an information model for SML before moving forward to tackle tougher issues such as attribute, mixed content, and namespace support. I think SML represents an unique opportunity to do things right in the right order. In contrast, XML information model is still being worked on, two years after XML syntax. There have been some wildly innovative ideas that came up in SML information model threads: attributed grammars, colored nodes, rhythmic encoding, unisyntax data model, and even some Grove model variations. Beauty of some of these ideas can be appreciated immediately. For example, following is a rather concise notation for our version of the Groves model: node := character | map(string,list(node)) other versions that followed removes the distinction between a character and a map, and then adds context: node = map(string, list(node)) node = tuple(parent, map(string, list(node))) Some ideas were less apparent but fantastic nonetheless. For example, the 'colored node' proposal starts with SML having just black and white nodes (name and value), then treats CSML (Colored-SML), CXML (Common-XML), XML, XHTML, and arbitrary markup languages as SML with nodes colored differently (i.e. attribute, PI, comment, etc.). 'colors' differ from 'types' in that the colors are not 'in' the model but provided by other means such as parsers or 'painters'. Leigh Dodds prepared an example titled "SML Color Book" which shows how the 'painting' is done. http://www.bath.ac.uk/~ccslrd/sml/coloringbook2.html While these ideas might seem a bit 'off-the-ground' to you, most members of SML-DEV are as practical as they come, and plan to use SML and related technologies to build commercial products. E-commerce, B2B or B2C data exchange in particular, seems to be the most common application SML-DEV members are interested in using SML in. Just as the design of XML was influenced by the primary interests of its inventors, publishing documents on the web, SML's design will likely be heavily influenced by our interests in e-commerce and data exchange. After all, SML will be our child. Best, Don Park - mailto:donpark@d... Docuverse - http://www.docuverse.com 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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