- From: George Lund <george@lundboox.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Tue, 6 Jul 1999 20:45:14 +0100
- To: www-html@w3.org
In article <4.2.0.56.19990706133440.00a94b80@pop.encyclozine.com>, Alan
Richmond <alan@encyclozine.com> writes
>At 05:50 PM 7/6/99 +0100, George Lund wrote:
>>In article <199906291424.KAA05456@ruby.ora.com>, Chris Maden
>><crism@oreilly.com> writes
>> >XML is a simplification of SGML
>>
>>and is hence completely pointless because computers get more powerful
>>with time, not less.
>
> I think the simplification was for people, not computers..
The stated goals of XML (in the W3C activity statement) make no mention
of making life easier for people to hand code stuff, but they do say...
- Deliver information to user agents in a form that allows automatic
processing after receipt
- Make it easy for people to process data using inexpensive software
Both of which are silly given that SGML could do the very same (there
are freeware SGML parsers out there - if that ain't inexpensive I don't
know what is!).
It actually makes it harder for people to write pages by hand by
requiring case-sensitive tags, doing away with tag minimization, etc.
Sure, it makes it easier to write DTDs and invent our own mark-up, but
how many of us want to do that? Most people want to write the actual
end-product _documents_ (like HTML). SGML makes life *easier* for that
majority, I'd say.
I think I'm probably having this debate about a year or so late, though
:-(
--
George Lund
Received on Tuesday, 6 July 1999 16:52:39 UTC