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On Wed, 2010-12-01 at 10:31 -0500, Simon St.Laurent wrote: [...] > There's been virtually no angst over which pieces of XML mattered. XML > syntax has been a constant in the markup, but apart from the original > DocBook DTDs schemas haven't mattered, and namespaces barely figured in. > The core of the project has been ever-evolving markup constructs that > we'll reuse in a largely unconstrained way. Yuri Rubinsky used to talk about SGML as being a bit like the elephant being described by a group of blind people, each encountering a different part of the animal. Schemas are really important to some people and irrelevant to many others. Namespaces are a pain to everyone ;-) but met some people's needs. > "SGML on the Web" was completely a failure, at least as > originally articulated, There's some truth in that, but, it brought the idea of declarative markup to the attention of a much wider community of people. > There are lots of good parts here, but I don't see the critical mass > needed to do to XML what XML itself did to SGML. Right, I agree. In particular, incompatible changes to XML that are proposed from time to time would do things like break people's television sets, car engines, 'plane navigation, ipod-shoes, and goodness knows what else. You'd need a _really_ compelling reason to move to an XML 2.0 right now. Of course, it's possible that JSON will give the necessary incentive: an XML that's as usable by programmers as JSON, but still useful for document engineering. But I doubt it - the reason JSON is easier is that it's not doing the hard parts, and once you include those you start to get the complexity again. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
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