[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: XML and inheritance and transformation of representations
With all due respect to both you and Henry, Paul, it's good and worth reading but some of the same misconceptions are in this presentation that bedevil markup technology in other presentations yet have been worked out of other presentations: 1. XML is NOT about separation of format and content. It enables that just as SGML enabled it. It is a smart thing to do, otherwise, *XML doesn't care*. Discriminate between good practice and required practice. 2. SGML is older than 12 years and is not more complicated than it has to be. It is more complicated than a web developer often needs, but as proposals are showing, web developers have not always understood all of the requirements for their projects and are now discovering that many of the SGML "complexities" are there to meet those undiscovered requirements. Caveat emptor. 3. As most/all of the XML developers were SGML developers, they certainly had thought about data traveling over the web. It was already a fact of life in many SGML applications, and many of the separation of content and format concepts had come from projects where implemented databases served SGML. See MIL-M-87269, US Navy MID, US Army IADS, the SAE work, the work on relational/SGML systems, etc. Frankly, it was only the HTML Working Group and the web zealots that failed to understand this initially. Even the ideas behind SOAP and SCL, etc. had been proposed years earlier. These required a narrowing into a single systemic application to become viable. To rephrase what Eliot Kimber put aptly, the web is mostly shared disk storage. It becomes more because of sharable definitions/contracts. XML succeeded wildly in the same way a tidal wave suddenly rears up at a shoreline after traveling hundreds of miles with barely a ripple on the surface. When the environment finally narrowed, the power of concepts that had been moving forward for three decades created quite a tall and sudden emergence, but not a surprising one. That it is sweeping a lot of developments away is not unexpected because that is what lexical unification is about: simplify the framework and reduce complexity. Yet note that for some applications, such as X3D, the need to keep two encodings and a different object model has been made clear. A little humility might be in order before a greater humiliation is in process. Len Bullard Intergraph Public Safety clbullar@i... http://fly.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/lensongs.ram Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h From: Paul Prescod [mailto:paul@p...] "Henry S. Thompson" wrote: > > ... > [2] http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/LayeredArch/ An excellent summary. Well worth reading.
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