[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Validation - a history.
From: Gavin Thomas Nicol [mailto:gtn@r...] >One side of that was that people found DTD's to be useful only at >certain points in the process... during the production process a >document is not always/seldom 'valid'. Market forces made them >optional ;-) Experience did. True. Even prior to IADS when working with the Context system at GE on the US Navy CASS program, I learned that we had to turn off validation until BigBindTime which for that system was bitmap production. 1. Syntax valid (aka, well-formed): no typing mistakes given a spell checker. 2. Logically valid: my code has no bugs. 3. System valid: your code and my code have no bugs. 4. Requirements valid: the user sees no bugs. But we all knew that. >I think that there were actually few, if any 'true' SGML parsers. The >reality was that a significant number of SGML *subset* parsers >existing that shared a fairly common set of features. Mostly true. The concepts of 'Unicorn-goodness' etc. were just coming along when the web burst. OTOH, the cost of parsers was mostly a burden a few years prior to the web. By the time HTML was being noticed, it wasn't an issue. It has to be remembered that when ISO 8879 was released, incompatibilities in computer systems passing files around were much worse than the time that the desktops made the web-as-we-think-we-remember-it possible. SGML was a feature-ridden mostly because to guarantee that list above, a lot more checking of agreement was needed. >Very true, though it is useful to see everyone's perspectives on the >battle for supremacy. No disagreement on that. But there is a lot about that speech that reminds me of the officers who sat in the Pentagon in the 1950s planning future aircraft and claiming that since we would never again fight a conventional war, we'd never need guns on jets, just rockets to take down bombers. They kept defending that decision well into the 1960s while the guys on the ground crews were trying to install guns in the field to take down MIGs that had them. Dogfighting never goes out of style. So it is with items 1 through 4 above. We just keep shifting the places in the process where the guns are mounted. len
[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] |
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|