[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Keeping ISO 8879 Alive (was RE: Markup perspecti
Take it any way you want; killing off SGML is a death sentence for the freedom to develop markup according to what is needed over what one thinks is needed. It is not a matter of moving beyond roots. That we will do and have done. It is matter of insisting on coherent specifications under the aegis of powerful standards, and of balancing the powers that produce these such that a radical fundamentalism doesn't engage a positive relativism in such a way as to leave us playing Highlander games. It is political. It is social. These things count. Elegant programming alone won't make it happen. We aren't rubber ducks in a bathtub. SGML is a living standard still in use, still in play. While that can be an uncomfortable fact for those who want one and only one organization and group to control XML development, for the rest, it is the key to keeping options open, choices available, a different court to plead a case if one court becomes too overloaded with special interests. One doesn't solve polarities; one manages them. Ummm... I like the infoset, DOM, and even namespaces when applied sensibly. They get me cheap interoperable tools that I didn't have when all I had was a parser, an ASCII editor, and a stylesheet compiler. I don't want to see the tools go away at all. I want the tool to be adaptible to the needs of the humans; not make the humans adapt to the needs of the tools. We need more markup specialists because they are the people who can spend the time in the committees grinding on a data definition that people will use. We also need (and the SGML experience made this very plain too) programmers with the savvy to interpret what comes out of committee and into code. XML is the bridge between the worlds. No one should claim primacy over the bridge or soon they will have to put up guards on both ends, and the walk to freedom will be a prisoner exchange. If we are going to that, I'd just as soon go back to gigging in bars for a living. I've already done too much time in the short sword wars. "The top must listen to the bottom. Not having memory is how we keep getting into these messes." Col. David Hackworth, commenting at a book signing on how Vietnam became a quagmire. len From: Mike Champion [mailto:mc@x...] 8/2/2002 9:48:40 AM, "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...> wrote: >Keep ISO 8879 alive. It is ISO that guarantees that markup >is the property of the commons. I'm not sure I agree with Len's characterization of the W3C or the intelligence quotient of those who think that XML should move beyond its SGML roots <grin>, but I do agree with the importance of keeping ISO 8879 alive.
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