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.