[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: [Fwd: Defining "public interfaces" inspecifications]

• To: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: [Fwd: Defining "public interfaces" inspecifications]
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2002 09:25:56 -0400
• In-reply-to: <1035707499.5129.15.camel@ibook>
• References: <1035620773.3402.5.camel@ibook> <p04330101b9e03fdf8466@[192.168.254.4]> <1035707499.5129.15.camel@ibook>

At 9:31 AM +0100 10/27/02, Eric van der Vlist wrote:


>I do think that the current situation is a disaster for extensibility.
>

I think XML 1.0 was designed to be extensible at the markup level. I 
think it's succeeded very well in that respect. Just look at the 
plethora of vocabularies out there. That's what the X in XML is about.

I think that quite wisely XML 1.0 was not designed to be extensible 
at the syntax level, and I feel that efforts to change or extend the 
syntax are contrary to the spirit of XML, will lead to significant 
confusion, and cause interoperability problems.

SGML is extensible at the syntax level, including the ability to 
change character sets and even change which characters delimit tags. 
Those few applications that truly need this level of extensibility 
should consider using SGML instead of XML.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|          XML in a  Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/              |
|  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/  |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://www.cafeaulait.org/      |
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/    |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+

• Follow-Ups:
  • RE: [Fwd: Defining "public interfaces" in specifications]
    • From: "Martin Soukup" <martin@d...>

• References:
  • [Fwd: Defining "public interfaces" in specifications]
    • From: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>
  • Re: [Fwd: Defining "public interfaces" inspecifications]
    • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
  • Re: [Fwd: Defining "public interfaces" in specifications]
    • From: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>

• Prev by Date: Re: ANN: xpath1() scheme for XPointer
• Next by Date: RE: Do We Need James Clark to get Good Recs?
• Previous by thread: Re: [Fwd: Defining "public interfaces" in specifications]
• Next by thread: RE: [Fwd: Defining "public interfaces" in specifications]
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread