[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: is that a fork in the road?
At 03:12 PM 3/2/01 -0600, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote: >We aren't forking. We've known forever this problem >existed. Again, the grove guys weren't noodling for >their edification and Newcomb has repeatedly stressed >in this forum that a simple DOM API wouldn't cut it >in the long run if one wants to do all of these ambitious >things. The grove stuff could be the fork in the road. I think groves/property sets/ abstract infosets accesible only by APIs cos XML/SGML is just syntax is a non sequiter. A towering intellectual achievement to a *man made* problem. We need to dare to speculate that the world can be a simpler place and see where that gets us. ISO 8879 was written in stone and all that groves, architectures, hytime stuff had to build on that stone rather than re-visit its foundations. XML 1.0 is written in stone but it is a much smaller stone (and all syntax!) and its higher layers are still on the drawing board. Right now with XML, we have a chance - never to present itself again - to learn from the SGML experience and dare to ask what alternatives are out there for the theoretical foundations of all this. Layered architectures have their limits - so do intertwingled architectures. Thanks to Steve Newcomb, Charles Goldfarb, Eliot Kimber etc. we can see into the crystal ball where that road may lead. It appeals to some. It does not appeal to others. It certainly does not appeal to me. The layered architecture approach has a much fuzzier crystal ball. Henry Thomson was doing some great stuff with it when I first me him at an SGML conference in Munich, Germany about 5 years ago. Omnimark Technologies were onto a great idea in my opinion with Micro Document Architectures but then dropped the ball. Then there was Metamorphosis, COST and more recently fascinating stuff going on with TREX/RELAX. There is tons of stuff here we can learn from. Tons of stuff we would be foolish to ignore. Just because XML picked up a lot of good stuff from SGML, it does not follow that we should blindly pick up all the other stuff and start tacking it onto XML.
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