| There's a wonderful DDJ interview with James Clark (author of expat and developer many other open source sgml and xml standards and tools like Relax/NG, and even horrible ones like XSLT ;) called "A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML", in which he explains how a standard has failed if everyone just uses the reference implementation, because the point of a standard is to be crisp and simple enough that many different implementations can interoperate perfectly. A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML: https://www.drdobbs.com/a-triumph-of-simplicity-james-clark-... I wrote more about his work in this discussion thread about Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past, and reading documents from 20 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16226209 >Reading documents from 20 years ago is a mixed bag. Links usually fail horribly, which was something Xanadu was trying to solve, but I'm not convinced they could have solved it so well that 20-year-old links would still actually work in practice. [...] >In the ideal world we would all be using s-expressions and Lisp, but now XML and JSON fill the need of language-independent data formats.
>Not trying to defend XSLT (which I find to be a mixed bag), but you're aware that it's precursor was DSSSL (Scheme), with pretty much a one-to-one correspondence of language constructs and symbol names, aren't you? >The mighty programmer James Clark wrote the de-facto reference SGML parser and DSSSL implementation, was technical lead of the XML working group, and also helped design and implement XSLT and XPath (not to mention expat, Trex / RELAX NG, etc)! It was totally flexible and incredibly powerful, but massively complicated, and you had to know scheme, which blew a lot of people's minds. But the major factor that killed SGML and DSSSL was the emergence of HTML, XML and XSLT, which were orders of magnitude simpler. James Clark: http://www.jclark.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clark_(programmer) |