What would be the problem of going back to SGML, it works so 
much better for so many things?  Its sort of like linux vs windows, 
it you started with windows, you don't really know what you can do, it 
started with linux you cannot get a handle on all the things that are 
available for you to do, so that you can od the thing you need done at the 
moment?  I would like to hear some serious why nots, beside just the 
market .. what about the needs?

 sterling

On Tue, 8 Nov 2005, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:

> Fun read.
> 
> When XML was SGML and not well-liked by the programming 
> community, the documentation and hypertext communities that 
> did like it conceived of many extraordinary uses for it. 
> When SGML became XML and was well-liked by the programming 
> community, most of those extraordinary uses dwindled as the 
> programming community was as it always is, absorbed in the 
> minutiae of tools and syntaxes, content to treat it as 
> bits on the wire, not as a fertile ground for extraordinary 
> uses.  Thus to the world at large, XML became plumbing, a 
> dull subject and mostly one that is well understood.
> 
> I cannot conceive of a commercial like the one for faucets 
> where an attractive venture capitalist is shown a software firm. 
> She places a chunk of XML down on the table in front of a CTO  
> and asks, "Can you design a business around this?"
> 
> But I think perhaps someone will.
> 
> len
> 
> From: Michael Champion [mailto:michael.champion@h...]
> Sent: Friday, November 04, 2005 7:21 PM
> 
> Thanks, I'd heard rumors about this presentation but hadn't seen it.  Really
> 
> thought provoking ... especially if contrasted with Adam Bosworth's almost 
> diametrically opposite position expressed in 
> http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=337
> 
> The way I (perhaps crudely) would characterize the positions are that Adam 
> thinks that XML/RDF  is too complex to be useful, so "worse is better" 
> things like HTML for text and RSS for data will become the mainstream 
> technologies that are more derived from XML than really applications of 
> generic XML.  Dana agrees that XML is too hard for mainstream developers to 
> process, so we need better tools and some fixes to XML to make it more 
> RDF-like.
> 
> I find myself more in Dana's camp than Adam's, but believe that XML/XQuery 
> features will be absorbed into programming languages rather than vice versa.
> 
> I do like her points about making XML more graph-friendly with links as 
> first class citizens, but the implications could get messy ....
> 
> Her points about declarative processing of XML are particularly interesting,
> 
> but contrast them with Anders Hjelsberg's discussion of the evolution of 
> mainstream languages to be more declarative in 
> http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05/TLN/TLN307_files/Default.htm#nopreload
> =1&autostart=1
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org>, an
> initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org>
> 
> The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/
> 
> To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription
> manager: <http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/index.php>
>