- From: Paul Prescod <papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
- Date: Mon, 02 Jun 1997 20:06:14 -0400
- To: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
len bullard wrote: > Unless the XML requirements are clear, adding more and more SGML > features > makes XML into SGML and only by sleight of hand gets rid of a perception > some here on this list and in other places have worked hard to foster: > SGML is Too Hard and XML is Simpler. XML is still VERY far from the implementation complexity of SGML. Do you feel you have are very familiar with the SGML standard? Would you be willing to undergo a little "quiz" administered by Erik Naggum? Would you be willing to write a parser that implements all of the features? Think about LINK, minimization, subdoc, asyncronous entities, etc. It is good to argue that feature X makes XML too hard, but I think that arguing that it makes it "almost as hard as SGML" is wishful thinking about the complexity of the SGML standard. Remember: SP doesn't implement all of SGML yet. So now we are arguing about how far along the spectrum of complexity (implementation time) XML should go: 5% or 10%. Some thought that XML was supposed to be just SGML without the hardly-used crap. Others thought that it was going to be a minimal extensible markup language. I think that we have been successfully doing both: applications that are not interested in validation have a very restricted set of features to deal with. Applications that want to do validations must know a lot more about content models, PEs, etc. If we restrict paramater entities to the *non-required* subset then only validating parsers will ever have to deal with them. Perl Hackers and Browser Vendors will not. Paul Prescod
Received on Monday, 2 June 1997 20:06:45 UTC