Re: XML when? [APOLOGY]

[hedley_finger@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Lee and the others:

My apologies.  Clearly the Afterburner toggle was flipped up when I hit the
Flame button.

The point I was trying to make was that it should be a relatively simple
task to incrementally improve FM+SGML to become FM+XSGML (by analogy with
the W3C's specification with XHTML as "almost XML").

In fact, the parsing task is simpler for XML with DTD than for SGML.  One
of the motivations for XML in the first place was the difficulty of writing
parsers for SGML which required look-ahead and backtracking to determine
context for the state machine.  And the difficulty of writing authoring
environments, etc. which could also handle all the possible SGML.

So, what I was really asking for was an incremental, INTERIM release of
FM+XSGML which allows for round-tripping of valid XML code, with the
understanding that there was no support for only well-formed XML or
Unicode, or whatever.  For transforming SGML to XML and vice-versa, refer
to the W3C note "Comparison of SGML and XML", "World Wide Web Consortium
Note 15-December-1997", "NOTE-sgml-xml-971215" (search on any of these
strings).  Admittedly out-of-date, it describes succinctly the level of
equivalance I was seeking for FM+XSGML.

Regards,
Hedley


At 11:39 AM +1000 6/27/01, hedley_finger@myob.com.au wrote:

> > >Why is it taking so long for Adobe to include XML handling in
> > >FrameMaker+SGML (FMS)?

> > Well... one could talk about parsers and entities, Unicode, namespaces,
>and an apparent disinterest on the part of XML > > content creators in
>valid XML, but I think this was rhetorical question, yes?

>Rhetorical?  You judge.

I apologize if I sounded flippant. XML is obviously important.

I am somewhat overly-sensitive to people looking at complex problems and
declaring them to be simple; it happens a lot in this business. But my
experience is that nobody really cares why a problem is difficult to solve,
they just want it done. My response was intended to infer complexity in the
problem being discussed but stay light on the detail.

Implementing credible support for XML has multiple aspects, including the
difficulty of transparent round-tripping and validation with current
parsers, support and preservation of namespaces, some kind of support for
and round-tripping of arbitrary Unicode code points, and a requirement to
support both well-formed and valid XML. It is far from being "a fairly
simple task."



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