[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: SGML, XML, redux
Before enthusiasm carries us too far down this road, I feel obliged to point out: 1) Len Bullard's point about groves is both logical and good sense, if the XML which we need, and are committed to building, is the XML which is the child and formal subset of SGML. 2) Our XML might be one which is a radical departure from essential premises of SGML. Without returning to troubled questions of syntax vs. semantics (!), it is possible--even reasonable and useful--to understand the fundamental point of SGML as this: SGML permits the faithful recreation of an author's work (and intent) across loosely-coupled systems where the environment in which a work is re-instantiated is materially different from that in which it was created, and from other environments in which it may have to be similarly realized. There is a feasible XML, premised on the concept of well-formedness and grounded thereby in the XML 1.0 Recommendation. This XML aims not to reproduce an original author's work, but to instantiate something entirely new. Not merely the expression, or presentation, of this new instance, but its ontology as well depends primarily on the local environment of its instantiation, and only secondarily upon the work of an earlier author. This new instance may draw upon numerous earlier works, giving uniquely local relative precedence to them. Indeed with XSLT and XLinking, XML may have already advanced further in specifying standards for this local processing than SGML ever has. 3) Documents which are products of this radical XML cannot be constrained to canonical semantics nor to a single abstract model, however vast, because a) a comprehensive compilation of the possible semantic outcomes is not possible, as they are unique to, and visible only in particular local instances and b) the 'atomic' constituents of any model may actually be created uniquely, and by a process step only just prior to, the realization of an instance which exhibits the model. In short, this is about autonomous process--not about the faithful recreation of canonical semantics nor instances of standard models. It is in fact about distributed processing in a peer-to-peer topology. 4) As recent threads on this list have illustrated, such local processes cry out for a standard processing model, not for static document abstractions. It seems axiomatic to me that the first process step must be a parse--that is, a processing of each input purely by its nature as XML syntax. There must then be locally specified rules for the relative precedence of inputs, as well as for precedence in applying particular linking or transformation operations. Some time ago, it seemed that the stylesheet might be the framework for laying out such rules, but it has since become too specific to XSLT, and we now require an overarching structure for rules which mediate among transformations, links, and even schematic constraints. Respectfully, Walter Perry
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