Not so oddly, as the looser formats (say VRML to X3D) gain traction, it
is precisely the toolkits that are possible using the DTDs/Schemas that
are being rediscovered but as you say, not by the browser vendors (they
hate them pretty much unanimously), but in the authoring tools.   That
tends to validate what Charlie Sorgi at Mentor Context told me would be
the case in the mid 80s when we were working on the CASS ATI project.
He published a Powerpoint of the 'things SGML is Good For' because he
wasn't a fan but was being forced to use it to win business.   He got it
right, so I can't and most of us can't claim XML itself is that
visionary.  Just a necessity for the moment of a triumphant technical
millieu called 'the web'.

It doesn't surprise me that SGML is still thriving in the businesses you
mention.  For all the talk of the "failure of SGML", there was an awful
lot of it around.   As I said before, XML was the victory of the SGML
losers.   And the wikis reinforce that the point about 'as the twig is
bent...'.  It isn't meant to be a dig; more a point that events and
history don't always match up because we tend to mythologize for morale
and ego.  Sometimes it is dumb luck and treachery. :-)

I wonder if XML is merely markup's midlife crisis before maturing.

len


From: Rick Jelliffe [mailto:rjelliffe@a...] 

Gavin Thomas Nicol said:

> The fact is that anyone with a reasonable amount of SGML experience 
> ended up using a core subset similar to XML. Ultimately there was 
> little new in XML, because it was based on something with a fairly 
> long history. Some things, like I18N and explicit DTD-less support 
> were good additions.

I think there were three factions in SGML: those who used OmniMark,
those who used SGMLS or NSGMLS, and those who had to roll their own
tools. While people in the first two factions certainly sometimes
normalized their data into fully-unminimized forms, it really was the
roll-your-own crowd, notably browser makers, who needed something
simpler than SGML.

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.

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.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

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