- From: Markku Savela <msa@anise.tte.vtt.fi>
- Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 17:48:55 +0300 (EET DST)
- To: roconnor@uwaterloo.ca
- CC: 75819671@it.ibm.com, www-html@w3.org
> > The point is that XML is designed to be easily parsed by browsers, SGML does > > not. > > The difficultly of making an SGML parser is probably overblown. The point is not in the difficulty. - You cannot parse general SGML based document, unless you have its DTD. For example, the simplest case, you have no idea which elements can be included inside others, and thus you have no way of knowing whether "<x>foo<y>bar" means really "<x>foo<y>bar</y></x>" or "<x>foo</x><y>bar</y>". This is very significant, if the tag you do recognize is 'x' and 'y' is something unknown. The content of the element could be either "foo" or "foobar" - With XML, you can at least recognize the elements in general and extract information from the elements you know about. in XML you know were even unknown elements end [right? Doesn't XML require explicit endtags?] -- Markku Savela (msa@hemuli.tte.vtt.fi), Technical Research Centre of Finland Multimedia Systems, P.O.Box 1203,FIN-02044 VTT,http://www.vtt.fi/tte/staff/msa/
Received on Tuesday, 12 October 1999 10:49:00 UTC