[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: The Goals of XML at 25, and the one thing that XML nowneed
On 20/07/2021 07:43, Rick Jelliffe wrote: [...] > XML is now at a much worse stage than where SGML was in 1995: > standardized, adopted, stable, fit for purpose, but essentially > solving the problems of the 1980s in a 1970s kind of way. I think it's in a much better state. The problems of the 1980s (and 90s) included a lack of understanding of markup, unwillingness of text owners to adopt an unproven technology, hostility of developers and programmers towards markup because it wasn't programming, and a host of others including the lack of standardised character suites, monstrously expensive software and slow machines.* Most of them are gone (a little residual hostility-out-of-ignorance remains). But XML solves the problems that publishers had, now that the original software and hardware problems are no longer an issue (you have rightly highlighted a bunch of new ones, but that's not XML's fault :-) * Much of the blame heaped on hardware is, I feel, misplaced. Certainly the software I used then, including the PAT database, Omnimark, sgmls, and TeX, beat the socks off anything else at the time, and still do. > IMHO, parallel-parseability is meets a constant demand and is a good > goal, and inplace parsing is a low-hanging fruit on this. In the publishing field they are nice-to-know, and possibly useful, but not if they break the model of markup irreconcilably. > By parallel-parseability I suppose I mean non-modal or random-access > parsing: that you should be able start at any point in a document > and figure out whether you are in tagging or data by parsing forward > until the next milestone delimiter (i.e. > or ;) which then tells you > what you started in. Non-modal would probably be a more descriptive term than parallel-parseability, as in many cases there wouldn't necessarily be anything to be parallel to. This is largely the situation I described in my work on editors, where an author request (mouse/key click) for a new (eg) section would require the software to work out where to go from the current cursor location to get to the next or pervious place where a section was a valid insertion. I assumed at the time that this was a problem not outside the scope of programmers to solve (https://cora.ucc.ie/bitstream/handle/10468/1690/Human-Interfaces-to-Structured-Documents.pdf#page=278) > Dan, Peter, Arjun, Mukul, Gavin ... gosh, so many voices from my past! Scary...same faces discussing the same stuff :-) Peter
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