Re: SDD bogus

Paul Prescod (papresco@technologist.com)
Sat, 09 May 1998 01:00:57 -0400

David Megginson wrote:
>
> It's a matter of finding the right balance: XML must be simple enough
> to parse that there is a healthy competition among parser writers (and
> thus, a better quality and larger choice of tools for application
> writers), but simple enough to write that authors (including
> developers of tools that generate XML) are willing to learn and use
> it.

I agree 100%. I just believe that XML does NOT have balance.

> SGML, with its bizarre tag-omission rules, delimiter-in-context
> recognition, shortrefs, etc., gave too much away to the authors, and
> as a result, there were very few good SGML parsers implemented (and
> never a one in Java, although many of us tried).

This strikes me as similar to Eliot's argument. We've gone too far in the
past so let's not go anywhere near there again. Rather, the opposite
should be true: we know from experience the limits of what is reasonable
and should standardize it for all of the same reasons we standardized many
other good practices in XML.

Paul Prescod - http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

Can we afford to feed that army,
while so many children are naked and hungry?
Can we afford to remain passive,
while that soldier-army is growing so massive?
- "Gabby" Barbadian Calpysonian in "Boots"