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Re: heritage (was Re: SGML on the Web)

• To: Patrick Durusau <pdurusau@e...>
• Subject: Re: heritage (was Re: SGML on the Web)
• From: Jeni Tennison <jeni@j...>
• Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2002 20:22:02 +0100
• Cc: XML DEV <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <3DA070F7.2030302@e...>
• Organization: Jeni Tennison Consulting Ltd
• References: <200210061641.MAA08123@m...><3DA070F7.2030302@e...>
• Reply-to: Jeni Tennison <jeni@j...>

Hi Patrick,

> Another advantage to our approach is that you don't need a new
> syntax to make it work, benefits are available here, now, today.

You say that you aren't providing a new syntax, but well-formed XML
documents can't represent overlapping structures (unless you use
empty-element or PI milestones of course). So in my view you *are*
using another syntax -- a semi-formed XML in the examples that you've
shown -- when you work with documents that you're interpreting as
holding overlapping trees.

As your README says in your example:

---
TestMilton.xml  a sample input file showing overlapping analyze of a section
                of Milton's 'Paradise Lost'. (Note file has .xml suffix even
                though it is 'ill-formed' according to XML 1.0 spec.)
---
                        http://www.sbl-site2.org/Extreme2002/JITTs.zip

My point is, I guess, that different syntaxes support different kinds
of structures, and XML *doesn't* support overlapping markup. If you
change XML to make it support overlapping markup, then it isn't XML
any more -- it's a new syntax that happens to look confusingly similar
to XML.

Of course that doesn't detract from the idea of using configurable
parsers to interpret a true XML document in different ways, and I
appreciate that you're just using an existing syntax to try out these
ideas, but as an XML person I'd feel a lot more comfortable with your
examples if you'd use well-formed XML, with milestones to represent
the overlapping structures, in your examples, rather than a
pseudo-XML.

(This thinking is why Wendell and I though it best to create a non-XML
syntax for LMNL; I appreciate that a new syntax might be something
that you want to avoid, but I think the only real alternative is to
use milestones everywhere, which is very tedious to write and quite
difficult to read.)

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/

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    • From: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>
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    • From: Patrick Durusau <pdurusau@e...>

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