Subject: The fate of SGML (was Re: CLOS is hard. Let's go shopping)
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 28 Sep 2002 22:27:24 +0000
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3242240844350299_-_@naggum.no>

* Robert Braddock
| I'm relatively new to lisp, but this same thing truly killed SGML.  Every new
| person needs someone next to him/her to periodically yell, "Dammit, don't use
| the parts you don't want!"

  Hmmm.  Part of the problem with SGML was the were about 12 different features
  that affected the syntax of the document instance, leading to 4096 different
  syntaxes that were all supposed to be SGML.  The problem was that you could
  neither turn a feature or not turn it on without the possibility of affecting
  the way the document would be parsed and processed.  This meant that you had
  to make a decision as to which of the features you wanted and make that
  decision system-wide, leading to a serious lack of interoperability, which
  was never the intended purpose of SGML to begin with.  E.g., the character
  set stuff was supposed to printed out on paper and shipped with the physical
  tape to the printer or typesetter.  Truly amazing parts of SGML was geared
  towards non-electronic document interchange and were horribly dated by the
  time the Internet hit the fan.

-- 
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway                 Today, the sum total of the money I
                                          would retain from the offers in the
more than 7500 Nigerian 419 scam letters received in the past 33 months would
have exceeded USD 100,000,000,000.  You can stop sending me more offers, now.