Re: Please stop writing specifications that cannot be parsed/processed by software

FYI item 4 in the list of goals of XML is

"It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents."

What is meant by "easy to write programs processing XML documents"? To implement an XML parser from scratch? In that case, I guess it's relatively safe to say this is neither very easy nor relevant since, fortunately you might say, nobody is creating XML parsers from scratch. But when using a parser library anyway, then processing XML is exactly as complicated as processing SGML since the parser lib does the heavy lifting, and emits just the same SAX events in both cases.

From what I gather by eg [1], "easy to implement" comes from a hope that there could be more than a single implementation. Fortunately, that has been taken care of for SGML now ;)

But still, what does "simplicity" buy you if nearly nobody writes XML documents by hand, and you need an elaborate preprocessing pipeline and/or editor magic anyway? Clearly, one needs to distinguish markup as a delivery or archival format vs markup as an authoring format, with the latter having much more affordances for text entry of the kind that SGML has, such as tag inference, short references, markup delimiter customization, and advanced entity uses.

This leaves XML as a delivery format (as opposed to SGML in its full glory being an authoring format). But even as a delivery format, XML goal number 0 (as in paragraph 1, sentence 2 of the XML spec abstract) hasn't been achieved:

"[XML]'s goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML"

where "generic" refers to DTD-less, fully-tagged markup not requiring markup declarations for mere parsing (as opposed to unconstrained SGML and HTML).

I think it would make sense for the XML community to go back one step and attempt to analyze what had gone wrong rather than dogmatically insist on XML being just perfect. Even James Clark started to question parts of XML (such as namespaces and the lack of "</>").

Cheers,

Marcus Reichardt

sgml.io

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20010617083629/http://www.ddj.com/articles/2001/0107/0107e/0107e.htm

Am 04.06.2023 um 16:48 schrieb C. M. Sperberg-McQueen <[email protected]>:


"G. Ken Holman" <[email protected]> writes:

...

"XML Schema? I don't need no stinking XML Schema!"

Isn't that the big draw of XML over SGML?

For some people, apparently, yes.

But for the record, I believe there are other reasons to use XML over
SGML, many of them related to item 4 in the list of goals in the XML
specification.

Michael

--
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Black Mesa Technologies LLC
http://blackmesatech.com

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