We were told that the average web guy wasn't very
bright and was very desperate. Charles was
being kind.
I was hoping to do away with parameter entities
up front but was told HTML made too much use of
them. The not-to-be-violated requirement of SGML
On The Web was HTML. It not being a
very relational-like language, and not much
of a tree, what you see is what you got.
XML is limited to web stuff. By design. That
helps to unlimit the web.
len
From: David Megginson [mailto:]
Tim Bray writes:
> Charles Goldfarb (lead designer of SGML) actually suggested that we do
> this in XML, simply forbid mixed content.
I'd be pretty suspicious of Charles on this point -- it would have
ensured that people kept using SGML for large documentation systems
and limited XML to Web stuff.
I do believe that it would be useful to have a middle-level data layer
(say, "XDL") on top of XML. That layer could enforce both
restrictions (no mixed content) and more abstract, data-specific
conventions (such as typing, if it were actually a good idea). Other
data oriented specs could be built on top of it.
