----- Original Message -----
From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@...>
To: <sml-dev@egroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, December 01, 1999 6:36 PM
Subject: [sml-dev] Re: SML < XML ?


> > DOM would be more interesting - but my point was you ought
> > to be able to demonstrate the SML 'simplicity' by trimming
> > the APIs.
>
> Probably the single most complicated part of the DOM is
> that the tree is "live". That has nothing to do with
> the use of XML.

You should have come to this week's working group meeting, Gavin.

6 -- count 'em -- SIX hours of discussion on how to resolve the mess that
is created when parsed entities meet namespaces. And they probably took
another six hours off my life because of the chocolate consumed to fight the
depression and caffeine consumed to fight the urge to sleep. And we ended
up deciding to essentially put up a sign saying "There Be Dragons There"
because
the problems are too complex to solve without mandating a lot of machinery
that would serve little purpose but to present a pretty face on a very, very
ugly mess.

I had a few private chats about SML at the meeting which were pretty
interesting. First, there appears to be zero, zilch, nada support for the
idea of
SML. Don't even THINK about approaching the W3C for their blessing,
Don. It would be D.O.A.
XML is *so* much simpler than SGML that the general opinion is that
it is simple enough. Also, there *are* a lot of people using parsed
entities, CDATA
sections, comments, and processing instructions that didn't chime in on
XML-DEV
when we discussed all this stuff.

Also, the interest the the XML features that were dropped from SML
transcends just the documentation-oriented people; I talked to an e-commerce
developer who couldn't live without parsed entities!

On the other hand, there's a very widespread agreement that the minimalist
philosophy behind SML is appropriate and needs to be more widespread.
There's a lot of frustration that the various XML-related groups can't get
the minimal specs out because they're spending their time "gold plating"
them
with potentially desirable but complex and controversial features.

I personally am intrigued by the idea of SML because it *mandates* the
minimalist
philosophy (Occam's Razor, as Robert LaQuey emphasized in his article).
Even
more important is the notion of a clean hierarchy of functionality layered
on top of
a minimal core. I honestly don't know if re-building the specs up in
layers will
work better than a pragmatic set of ad-hoc recommendations about where the
dragons are in the XML world. On the other hand, the question is too
important
to decide by default, so perhaps parallel efforts to promote the idea of
Occam's
Razor in the W3C world and to actually go out and re-architect the specs in
the SML world is the best way of proceeding.