[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Remembering the original XML vision
This may turn into an interesting thread. Is this a fair assertion: few markup system users will be productive unless a markup specialist sets up the system for them? A lot about the perception of markup is determined by the tradeoffs this person is trained to make. Given that assertion, what is the best markup design that the specialist can produce to get the highest productivity from the user? What is the impact of the GUI chosen on the design of the XML? (ideally, none, but this implies costs). Long ago and far away, we had the SGML Way. Without getting into the details, it did not always produce good answers for these questions although it could ensure a well-annotated document. Much of the slag laid at the feet of SGML was the result of monolithic document types, and insisting on the SGML Way over smart and efficient markup designs for particular applications. We tend to accept uncritically certain myths, and I believe, for that reason, repeat certain mistakes. XML is supposed to be the culmination of the shared experience of the SGML community. Have we gotten any smarter? Here are two possibly mutually exclusive assertions I've encountered along The Way: o Markup tags should be human readable and understandable, using lower camel case. o The length of a tagname does affect message size and in network applications, this can affect system performance. Given a situation, either of these is true. Given use of XSLT or other transformative technologies, neither is exclusive. len From: David Megginson [mailto:david@m...] The real problem is that neither SGML nor XML is particularly easy for authors to use and understand. In the data world, we can remove much of the unfamiliarity by using input forms, but in the document world, authors have to learn the whole new world-view of generic markup even if they do have nice, GUI-based, WYSIWYMG editors to hide the pointy brackets.
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