Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
Cat fights are always a good show. Can we say, behavior attribute?. :-) I am starting a web site where XML newcomers can purchase a set of ceramic letters "ISO SGML". Before every XML presentation they make, they take a rubber mallet and smash it then tell their audience they want to get past the traditional bashing quickly and get on to the good parts. That has to be funnier than "SGML is just a pain in the ass" as a recent speaker here told his audience. An overview should also include the period when comp-text-sgml was in its heyday, the CALS projects particularly Caporlette, Botticelli, et al who slaved over the IETM specs specing and creating most of the early functional server side SGML databases, the Army work that put cheap stylesheet-driven hypertext on a Windows platform, the 28001 work on the FOSI, the work in Europe on AECMA that incorporated the best of the American efforts and provided a really modular DTD, the earliest work on Gencoding that kicked it all off, the papers of deRose et al in the hypermedia publications, etc, the long long long deliberations of the SGML ISO working group who spent years on the road before e-mail and lists relieved the airlines of a bit of profit. It was a long road to where developers accept the use of markup technologies and some folks, notably Charles Goldfarb and his collegues put away wealth and advantage to ensure open systems. We didn't get all of this for nothing. Some folks paid the price. XML is a distillation and before we get too enthralled with the XML SIG and WG work, we have to remember we started out with running code and smoother consensus than any group in the short history of the W3C. And we still had to fight like cats.. must be the fun part of design work and we love it. Len Bullard http://fly.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/lensongs.ram Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ ***************************************************************************
|
