On Jun 06, 2006, at 19:34, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
> SGML is alive and well in some quarters, XML-DEVers may be  
> surprised to
> hear. Last month I had to do some S1000D related work
> (military/aerospace), and it seems that SGML is pretty entrenched  
> there
> still, for the moment.

That's not so surprising when you think of how much COBOL is still  
used :)

> It is also worth reflecting that in some sense XML has failed, to the
> extent that XML was an effort to deny that people needed reduced  
> markup:
> reduced markup formats have thrived in the form of Wikis and even the
> dreaded SML/YAML/CVS/.ini files. XML's adoption has meant that Wiki
> formats are not specified using SGML, and so there is no standard  
> way of
> extracting an XML-compatible informations set. XML has made a lot of
> information available with a standard infoset, but also alienated a  
> lot of
> information that potentially could have been accessed with the same
> infoset.

And microformats, Ye Aulde HTML, etc.. XML picked a subset of SGML  
that fit a specific goal. I wonder (completely idly) if there  
wouldn't be value in extracting the minimisation features from SGML  
to create some form of "XML (Infoset) Extraction" spec, similar to  
what is being done with GRRRDDL?

-- 
Robin Berjon
    Senior Research Scientist
    Expway, http://expway.com/