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From: <AndrewWatt2000@a...> > That's an interesting comment. I guess I would have made the seemingly > opposite statement: "The SGML vision is exclusive". By that I mean that SGML > was, and is, a pretty impenetrable morass to the uninitiated. When I > purchased my copy of the SGML Handbook a few years back I found it a > startling failure in communication. Err, this is a comment on the SGML Handbook, not ISO 8879. They are not the same. I find 8879 itself far more straightforward to use than in Charles' version. People may be interested in a page count: SGML - 85 pages (in my printed copy) without the annexes XML - 52 pages (printed out from a web browser, at a medium to small setting) Add a couple of pages for XML 1.1 without the appendixes. Now consider that SGML gives poor-man's versions of schemas, namespace (SUBDOC), regular fragmentations (shortrefs), and compression (minimization), and a profile/feature system to allow the user to view things as layers. It is nice to remove 33 pages from SGML: but we have replaced them with hundreds of pages of specs like namespaces and XML Schemas. Viewed as an exercise in reducing the impenetrable, XML has been a total failure; viewed as an exercise in refactoring, it has not been a total failure. Cheers Rick Jelliffe
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