Re: XML: The good, the bad, and the ugly

From: Christopher Browne <cbbrowne_at_acm.org>
Date: 18 Oct 2004 14:09:39 GMT
Message-ID: <2ti153F1vljpbU1@uni-berlin.de>

"Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote:

> "Christopher Browne" <cbbrowne_at_acm.org> wrote in message news:2tgmgeF1v44fjU1_at_uni-berlin.de...

>> "Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote:
>> >> XML, it seems to me, is a format designed for general data transfer.
>> >
>> > It's a format designed to markup text with presentation, which
>> > is part of why it's so *bad* for general data transfer.
>>
>> It's a recreation of Lisp s-expressions produced by people that got
>> there by hacking on SGML who, as likely as not, didn't know they'd get
>> s-exprs, and wound up with something less good...

>
> Exactly.
>

>> It's NOT for "marking up text with presentation;" the creators
>> certainly _did_ know that what they were doing was to create a way
>> of structuring data that _wasn't_ about presentation.

>
> I dunno. What was SGML designed for? What design considerations
> changed from SGML to XML?

When they created XML, based on SGML, they removed "architectures" (which nobody understood and fewer people implemented) and required that everything be fully tagged, which all allowed things to be handled more simply than SGML.

E.g. - in SGML, it wasn't necessarily necessary to close every tag you open, if the DTD told you how to cope with the missing tags.

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Received on Mon Oct 18 2004 - 09:09:39 CDT