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Re: How many XML languages are produced each year?

• From: Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie>
• To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
• Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2014 23:11:38 +0000

On 01/20/2014 08:36 PM, Tom Magliery wrote:
> I wonder how large the union language would be.

I wonder why anyone would want to know this :-)

> I wonder how often the same language has been invented
> inadvertently. 

Certainly a few times, for some value of "same". I imagine most of us
who deal with a variety of industries have come across vertical-market
DTDs and schemas that basically represent the same thing with different
names and fractional variations in arrangement.

> What I mean by "same" is that there's some kind of minimal grammar
> that would describe one of these invented instance documents, and it
> just so happened that someone else created an entirely different
> instance document that would be recognized by the same minimal
> grammar.

Not quite that specific, but in the text-document field there isn't a
whole lot of difference between the hierarchy of TEI and the hierarchy
of DocBook. There's a much larger difference between the element types
in the Pool and the Flow, but there are many common ones as well.

The only reason for the possibility of a "minimal grammar" as you
describe it would seem to be the fact that documents of the same type
all tend to have a similar structural grammar, so the argument becomes
circular.

///Peter

• Follow-Ups:
  • RE: How many XML languages are produced each year?
    • From: "Tom Magliery" <tom.magliery@justsystems.com>

• References:
  • How many XML languages are produced each year?
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
  • Re: How many XML languages are produced each year?
    • From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
  • RE: How many XML languages are produced each year?
    • From: "Tom Magliery" <tom.magliery@justsystems.com>