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

Re: SML: Second Try

• To: "xml-dev" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: SML: Second Try
• From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@r...>
• Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 03:10:47 -0500
• In-reply-to: <022301c2d0d7$a69c4380$4bc8a8c0@A...>
• Organization: Red Bridge Interactive, Inc.
• References: <GHEDLDCGLHKOAICLGHKGOEKDCAAA.news@o...> <200302100208.10648.gtn@r...> <022301c2d0d7$a69c4380$4bc8a8c0@A...>
• User-agent: KMail/1.4.3

On Monday 10 February 2003 02:40 am, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
> The value of that fluff is that it prevents us, just as much as the
> separation of presentation and content, from being reliant on proprietary
> tools. Fluff is king. It is the fluff that makes XML useful even at the
> cheap end of town: you can successfully work with quite large document
> sets, multiple people commenting on documents, and hand-tune the rendered
> output all with just vanilla text editor and the file system, as years of
> SGML/XML have proven.  Take away XML's utility at the cheap-end, and you
> lessen its ubiquity and therefore usefulness at the high-end too.

A spoonful of syntactic sugar as it were... I agree. It's like leaving little 
extensibility routes in DTD's/schemas that give people enough flexibility to 
do what they want in the way of tweaks, in a fairly structured way.

Most of the "misfeatures" people debate in xml-dev were at least as hotly 
debated during the development of XML. The things that are left are the 
things that people cared deeply about, and more than likely still do, and for 
good reason. That was hardly "SGML people drove hard to get all their baggage 
into the XML specification" when "XML was supposed to simply be a human and 
machine readable markup language where anyone can define the tags". 

I personally think it's all the *other* stuff that really makes things 
messy... 

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: SML: Second Try
    • From: David Carlisle <davidc@n...>

• References:
  • RE: SML: Second Try
    • From: "Owen Walcher" <news@o...>
  • Re: SML: Second Try
    • From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@r...>
  • Re: SML: Second Try
    • From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...>

• Prev by Date: Re: SML: Second Try
• Next by Date: convert my relational database to XML
• Previous by thread: Re: SML: Second Try
• Next by thread: Re: SML: Second Try
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread