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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: 10th anniversary of the annoucement of XML ..need he
 Not so oddly, as the looser formats (say VRML to X3D) gain traction, it is precisely the toolkits that are possible using the DTDs/Schemas that are being rediscovered but as you say, not by the browser vendors (they hate them pretty much unanimously), but in the authoring tools. That tends to validate what Charlie Sorgi at Mentor Context told me would be the case in the mid 80s when we were working on the CASS ATI project. He published a Powerpoint of the 'things SGML is Good For' because he wasn't a fan but was being forced to use it to win business. He got it right, so I can't and most of us can't claim XML itself is that visionary. Just a necessity for the moment of a triumphant technical millieu called 'the web'. It doesn't surprise me that SGML is still thriving in the businesses you mention. For all the talk of the "failure of SGML", there was an awful lot of it around. As I said before, XML was the victory of the SGML losers. And the wikis reinforce that the point about 'as the twig is bent...'. It isn't meant to be a dig; more a point that events and history don't always match up because we tend to mythologize for morale and ego. Sometimes it is dumb luck and treachery. :-) I wonder if XML is merely markup's midlife crisis before maturing. len From: Rick Jelliffe [mailto:rjelliffe@a...] Gavin Thomas Nicol said: > The fact is that anyone with a reasonable amount of SGML experience > ended up using a core subset similar to XML. Ultimately there was > little new in XML, because it was based on something with a fairly > long history. Some things, like I18N and explicit DTD-less support > were good additions. I think there were three factions in SGML: those who used OmniMark, those who used SGMLS or NSGMLS, and those who had to roll their own tools. While people in the first two factions certainly sometimes normalized their data into fully-unminimized forms, it really was the roll-your-own crowd, notably browser makers, who needed something simpler than SGML. SGML is alive and well in some quarters, XML-DEVers may be surprised to hear. Last month I had to do some S1000D related work (military/aerospace), and it seems that SGML is pretty entrenched there still, for the moment. It is also worth reflecting that in some sense XML has failed, to the extent that XML was an effort to deny that people needed reduced markup: reduced markup formats have thrived in the form of Wikis and even the dreaded SML/YAML/CVS/.ini files. XML's adoption has meant that Wiki formats are not specified using SGML, and so there is no standard way of extracting an XML-compatible informations set. XML has made a lot of information available with a standard infoset, but also alienated a lot of information that potentially could have been accessed with the same infoset. Cheers Rick Jelliffe ----------------------------------------------------------------- The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org>, an initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org> The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription manager: <http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/index.php> 
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