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Subject:Single sourcing and whether XML is a pig or a cat From:"HALL Bill" <bill -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 24 Oct 2003 11:48:55 +1000 (EST)
Mark Baker said in response to Goober:
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You talked about letting the cat out of the bag. A poke is a bag.
Medieval scam artists would sell baby pigs in pokes. But when you got
home you would discover you had a cat in the bag instead of a pig. So,
to avoid buying a pig in a poke, you have to let the cat out of the bag.
XML is a pig in a poke, because it sells itself as superior to SGML when
it is, in fact, inferior, at least for document applications.
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Based on my experiences with both standards, Goober and Mark are both
somewhat overgilding their respective lilies.
For most uses, even in technical writing XML has the advantage that ever
more (and more powerful) tools are coming on the market and are becoming
cheaper to buy thanks to the market competition. This is an advantage
not to be sneezed at.
Tag minimization allowed by SGML is only good for someone who is trying
to write raw SGML (e.g., HTML, where tag minimization is allowed by the
SGML DTD that defines its rules), otherwise it can allow sloppy
structure and does add to the cost of developing SGML applications to
cope with it.
However, the one difference between SGML and XML which has proved very
important to the design of our DTD's is the fact that SGML allows
exclusions and inclusions.
For example we have used the concept of inclusion to define a single
element in the DTD that allows the inclusion of any number of "language"
elements (as a wrapper) anywhere in the document structure that requires
an alternative text within the basic structure of the document. The
approach has proven to be very easy to administer and parse by
comparison to what would have been required to provide the same degree
of flexibility within the constraints of XML.
In our requirement, we only use the capability to deal with differences
in the documentation required by our Australian and New Zealand
customers, but the principle is general and could be of substantial use
to people developing multi-lingual documentation. XML's rules
specifically prevent the approach we used.
Regards.
Bill Hall
Documentation Systems Analyst
Head Office, Engineering
Tenix Defense
Williamstown, Vic. 3016
Phone: 03 9244 4820
Email:bill -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com
URL: http://www.tenix.com
Honorary Research Fellow
Knowledge Management Lab
School of Information Management & Systems
Monash University
Caulfield East, Vic. 3145
Phone: 03 9903 1883
Email: william -dot- hall -at- infotech -dot- monash -dot- edu -dot- au
URL: http://www.sims.monash.edu.au/research/km/
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