Duane, (01)
I have a very high regard for the *ML family of languages, which I have
been using since the 1970s. I used GML for formatting documents for
most of my career at IBM -- that includes creating camera-ready
copy for my 1984 book and many papers that I published externally. (02)
In the late 1980s, I participated in some workshops in computational
linguistics, where I recommended SGML for annotating documents. I
wasn't the only one who did so, but I was one of the early adopters. (03)
When HTML came out, it was easy for me to convert GML documents to
HTML documents (although I missed many of the GML formatting tags
that had no HTML counterparts). I still use HTML for doing almost
all of my word processing. Then I use OpenOffice to do the final
formatting and translation to PDF. (And OpenOffice uses XML under
the covers for their document formats). (04)
I also use Mozilla tools (which are also based on XML). (05)
> XML is an "expression" of data. This can be metadata, abstract
> models, UML or just about any data imaginable. (06)
When it's appropriate, I definitely approve. But the "sweet spot"
for *ML is in marking up documents. That includes inserting tags,
such as the RDFa tags or the Microdata used by schema.org. (07)
But for anything beyond tags that are immediately related to the
document (as in RDFa), XML is so far out of its sweet spot, that
it very quickly turns sour. JavaScript uses the script-tag for
inserting language-like material into web pages. That is still
the best way to embed languages into a web page. (08)
> I think that your assertion that Tim did it for political pressure (09)
I didn't say that Tim B-L exerted the pressure. And I wasn't the
one who introduced the word 'political'. But just listen to Guha's
talk. He wanted to use LISP notation for RDF. So did Ora Lassila,
Pat Hayes, and many others who had long experience in AI. I wasn't
there at the time, so I don't know who to blame. (010)
> XSLT, SML Schema etc all come from the same basic model (011)
XSLT is another disaster. There have been good tools for processing
languages since the 1960s. I developed some myself. But XSLT is
a horribly inefficient example. I'll admit that XSLT was designed
for processing languages whose syntax uses XML. But for most of those
languages, XML notation was a very bad choice -- for both human *and*
computer efficiency. You cannot improve a bad syntax by using a bad
tool to process it. (012)
John (013)
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