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Re: What is XML For?

• To: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>
• Subject: Re: What is XML For?
• From: Alaric Snell <alaric@a...>
• Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2002 22:56:59 +0000
• Cc: paul@p... (Paul Prescod),xml-dev@l... ('The Deviants')
• In-reply-to: <200210282230.RAA20796@m...>
• References: <200210282230.RAA20796@m...>

On Monday 28 October 2002 10:16 pm, John Cowan wrote:
> Alaric Snell scripsit:
> > XML was designed, sometime in the late 90s; quite incidentally they
> > decided to subset SGML because it seemed a good base for solving the
> > problem at hand (and scarily enough, I agree with them! XML's great as an
> > SGML-lite :-)
>
> Au contraire.  XML was *designed* as SGML-lite in the first place.

I wasn't there, but I imagine the people who made it first had a statement of 
problem (which I imagine was along the lines of "Hmmm, HTML is a mess and 
everyone's producing content as HTML even though it has myriad forms of other 
structures behind it that are lost to automated processing when turned into 
HTML. What shall we do?") that preceded "Hey, let's make a simple subset of 
SGML" by at least one fiftieth of a second?

Or did they decided to subset SGML, then sat around deciding how to justify 
it afterwards? To be honest, I'm not entirely discounting that possibility :-)

ABS

-- 
Oh, pilot of the storm who leaves no trace, Like thoughts inside a dream
Heed the path that led me to that place, Yellow desert screen

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    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

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    • From: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>

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