From owner-freebsd-stable Thu Mar 25 22:22:18 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from guru.phone.net (guru.phone.net [209.157.82.120]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 85F5714E07 for ; Thu, 25 Mar 1999 22:22:17 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mwm@phone.net) Received: (qmail 45845 invoked by uid 100); 26 Mar 1999 06:21:58 -0000 Received: from localhost (sendmail-bs@127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 26 Mar 1999 06:21:58 -0000 Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 22:21:58 -0800 (PST) From: Mike Meyer To: stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: .sgml In-Reply-To: <199903260338.UAA13216@freebie.dcfinc.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Thu, 25 Mar 1999, Chad R. Larson wrote: > Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 20:38:55 -0700 (MST) > From: Chad R. Larson > Reply-To: chad@dcfinc.com > To: Mike Meyer > Cc: stable@freebsd.org > Subject: Re: .sgml > > > > And Extensible Markup Language (XML) seems to be where the world > > > is headed. > > > > XML is another application of SGML; this one defining a subset of SGML > > simplified enough to be grasped by the authors of the popular web > > browsers (most of *still* can't properly parse an HTML 2.0 document). > > Ok, that's the cynics few of XML. The official story is that it's got > > all the parts of SGML that aren't used by most people taken out, so > > that an XML parser can be written over the weekend, instead of being a > > major project in and of itself. > > And don't forget the "Extensible" part. You get to define your own > tags. We're using that commercially to define the interfaces to our > systems for third party vendors. They no longer have to track our > releases. If we add a feature, they can (while parsing) say, "I > don't know what that is, but I sure know how to ignore it." That's one it's a subset of SGML - it's an application that lets you add tags. Not the first one, but the one that's gotten the most press. In theory, you could add tags in HTML that would be safely ignored by other browsers. In practice, the people writing the popular browsers did a lousy job of defining tags that wouldn't cause problems if you ignored them. Hence was born attribute-based styling and CSS.