Re: XML Editors

>At 10:48 AM 9/13/96 CDT, Paul Grosso wrote:
>
>>I.  Which of the following statements comes closest
>>(1) the majority of existing SGML editors can create XML;
>>(2) in theory, an ideal SGML editor could create XML;
>>(3) new tools will have to be created or existing tools modified 
>>    to enable the creation of XML.

(1) seems fine to me, but I presume we needn't do a formal survey to get
50%; we just need to make reasonable accommodation to the current state of
editor technology. 

Of course any editor which tried to apply a lot of minimization when saving
files, is out of bounds. Someone could even write an SGML editor that
calculates what combination of SHORREF, DATATAG, and LINK will lead to the
bare minimum number of bytes in the saved form, and write that. Obviously
such an editor won't write XML-parsable document instances. At a less
obvious level, the same holds with respect to any minimization we eschew
(like unquoted attributes!). Fortunately most SGML editors seem to never use
minimization in their output (any known exceptions, *please* raise them!).

If we were to require that any SGML form any conceivable editor chose to
write out be valid XML, then we would have asserted that SGML is a subset of
XML. If at the same time we maintained our current hope that XML be a subset
of SGML, then they're mutual subsets, so they're equal and we couldn't
remove anything.

Received on Friday, 13 September 1996 17:47:41 UTC