• From: "Len Bullard" <cbullard@h...>
• To: "'XML Developers List'" <xml-dev@l...>
• Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 22:00:11 -0500

No.  It was a myth that provided the excuse to simplify SGML.  The average
web designed was conceived of as a simpleton and that justified a working
group and special interest group from a commercial consortium.   Holding on
to the DTD met a need for those who practiced authoring with the common
tools of the time.  The complexity that followed met the needs of
programming specialties.  The DPH had served its purpose and was quickly
abandoned in the gold rush to push more programming functionality into the
web browser, itself, an architectural mistake.

XML is a bit of a botch but once HTML, itself a bit of a botched design,
flourished, the patches were ladled on.   The web today like any engineering
task accomplished by ladling committees has that quality of stew.  Exploring
its history of design is like looking at the New York subway system
expecting to find a well-thought through complete work when in fact it is
ladled layers built at different times for different purposes with different
architectural conceits.  Something meant to be a means to schlep documents
became a programming platform.   An attempt at simplifying a document
language became the world's weirdest and in some ways most complex
programming toolkit.

That is what declaring victory with minimum foresight enables.  Understand
the inevitabilities of consensus.

len


From: Michael Ludwig [mailto:mlu@a...] 

Sorry to hear it hurt so much. On the other hand, did anybody
seriously expect the DPH to write his own parser?

• References:
  • Xml Revisited
    • From: "Jim Tivy" <jimt@b...>