Re: XSL-like DTD

Subject: Re: XSL-like DTD
From: Rick Geimer <rick.geimer@xxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 03 Sep 1999 14:34:44 -0700

Francis Norton wrote:

> Would it be totally crazy to propose that we abolish nested
> content-models for a simple schema standard?

Yes.

> Admittedly this is more verbose, but I have been looking at the "all"
> compositor in XML Schema, and while my views may be coloured by the fact
> that I am attempting to use pure XSLT, I'm now convinced that having an
> "all" at the top of a deeply nested element content model simply takes
> exponential time to process and probably cannot be validated by the hand
> for any sufficiently complex document. Why are we flying so far from the
> spirit of XML?

Indeed, we have flown far from the spirit of XML, just not in the
direction you are thinking. Am I the only one who still believes the
abstract of the XML 1.0 Recommendation?

<quote>
The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a subset of SGML that is
completely described in this document. Its goal is to enable generic
SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is
now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation
and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML.
</quote>

The change you proposed would make it much more difficult to use XML as
a web delivery tool for SGML documents, all the for sake of making it
just a little easier for tool developers. XML has already strayed too
far away from it's stated goal in my opinion, lets not go any further.

Rick Geimer
National Semiconductor
rick.geimer@xxxxxxx


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