Re: XML interchange [was Re: Stylesheet association]

Paul Grosso wrote:
> It is still way too hard to hand off to someone all the various files
> associated with an SGML application in such a way that the recipient
> can easily reconstruct it.  SDIF has existed for years, SGML Open's
> TR9401 made a simple stab at addressing this in its "Issue B: an
> interchange packaging scheme", and then the MIME-SGML work was another
> attempt to standardize this, but there appears to be no interoperably
> accepted solution.  Some of us feel this is such an important issue
> that perhaps it should be the "fourth phase" of the XML effort.

Sorry for the long quote... I agree with this.

One of the difficulties has always been defining the requirements.

Mime-SGML (as I see it) derailed itself by having two proposals, one
that required changes to mailers and gateways (politically difficult)
and one that was less technically elegant.

Having said that, HTML browsers have raised the water level, because of
progressive concurrent rendering.  Anyone who has used the Opera browser
under windows [1] has seen how fast it is...  it fetches up to 20 things
concurrently, with up to 8 connections to any given server.

An XML packing scheme probably ought to allow random-access fetching.

Perhaps there will be other requirements for XML, that we have yet to discern.

So yes, by all means let's work on this, and, as you say, let's leave
it until after the current items are all dealt with., and preferably until
we have some deployment experience, at least in the labs.

Lee

References:
[1] http://opera.nta.no/

-- 
Liam Quin, lee@sq.com         | lq-text freely available Unix text retrieval
Senior Technical Consultant   | FAQs: Metafont fonts, OPEN LOOK UI, OpenWindows
SoftQuad Inc. +1 416 544-9000 | xfonttool (Unix xfontsel in XView)
http://www.softquad.com/      | the barefoot programmer

Received on Wednesday, 12 March 1997 18:50:29 UTC