[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: XML=WAP? And DOA?
Scary why? Because perhaps all the information you have been fed on a regular basis for the last few years turns out to be partially wrong? That shouldn't scare you. It should embarass you and make you mad. All the answers? No, because the answer that is right in one local space is wrong in another. SGML got a lot of the requirements for very large and non-unique cases of text systems right. But, that is a problem space large enough that implementing it eliminates everyone but programmers with several CS degrees from major Unis. Implementing a subset of it was done several times by people who didn't have CS degrees to begin with. So, choose the boundary of the questions and you get a reasonable answer for that. XML got popular fast partly based on hype, partly based on the then-powerful W3C imprimatur, partly due to the rampant greed of the web community at that time, and partly because it is a smart subset and relaxed the requirement for processing a schema at runtime in a separate syntax. Today almost all of those conditions have changed. Do we still get the same answers? No to XML++. That screws over XML and confuses people even more ("my precious!"). Do this the right way. Go to ISO and refactor SGML ISO 8879 as part of the regular standard review. For crying out loud, learn how to use the system instead of trying to reinvent it like drywall. Have patience and arrive at the meetings with your homework done. It worked for the XML WG and SIG. After several years, it should be admitted we should have done this to begin with instead of plotting a coup and screwing over the system. We needed a subset of SGML for the web; not a knife fight for control of the future. Meatheads. What you want for SGML, BTW, is not an SGML cookbook. You want a copy of SP from James Clark and a copy of the SGML Handbook from Dr. Charles Goldfarb (Oxford Press). Neither are easy. A complete solution never is. len -----Original Message----- From: Paul T [mailto:pault12@p...] > > OK, OK, really nice thing should allow both, because > > some people need to edit it in a GUI HTML editor, > > but some people are editing templates in vi / notepad > > And I think that there is no possible markup that > > would be good for *both* cases. > > You might want to have a look at SGML - you can support both syntaxes by simply > defining two SGML declarations. The DTD remains the same for both markup > schemes but the instances are different. On top of that, you can assign context > sensitive behaviour to particular characters from within the DTD, allowing you > to process a csv file with a DTD. > > This may not be as archaic as it sounds. If you are able to separate the data > capture/modification/markup from the downstream usage with a normalisation > process, then why not? We routinely still use SGML tools at the start of XML > projects - when the objective is simply an XML file, pragmatism beats > standardisation every time. Can you 'configure' SGML to use *both* { and <% 'mixed' in a same file? Can you 'configure' SGML for some other tricks with 'separators' ? If yes, then, perhaps, it may be not a crazy idea to try re-factoring SGML into XML++ or XML--. ;-) Maybe, SGML already has all the answers, it is just hard to understand what was better to throw out of it and it is the macroprocessing part of SGML that should not be thrown out ;-) Rgds.Paul. PS. I'd greatly appreciate a URL to something like "SGML Cookbook". Google is good, but some advice from human being is always better. Many thanks. PPS. 'Worse is better' means "no namespaces, but unique prefixes are sufficient". So it looks like there is at least one thing that SGML got 'right' and XML did not. Hmm... Scary...
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