Re: Parsing < and <

Jon_Bosak@Novell.COM
Mon, 24 Apr 95 15:37:01 EDT

> The as I learn more about SGML, the less it seems an elegant solution and
> the more it seems a mass of twisty little gotchas (like the `mixed content'
> gotcha, for example). Is this just a phase in the learning curve, or is
> SGML really like that?

SGML is really like that. But it can't be any other way, because the
problem it solves is not an elegant problem and does not admit of an
elegant solution. This is very hard for computer folks to accept, but
relatively easy for those of us who have had some exposure to either
linguistics or the philosophy of language. If people thought the way
that computers did, the problem would be much simpler, and so would
SGML. But they don't, so it's not. That's the bottom line of
approximately 25 years of collective inquiry into this subject.

There are some things that can be done to make SGML a little less
weird; for example, the gotcha that says that you can't use the same
value (such as "yes") for more than one attribute is obviously a bad
idea and should be eliminated. Such changes would make life a little
easier for those of us who have to struggle with the beast on a daily
basis, and anyone who is seriously interested in making this happen
should join the folks in the SGML revision effort at ANSI X3V8 and ISO
SC18/WG8 and get to work. But if you understand what SGML attempts to
do (which is fairly awesome) and you understand what writers do (which
is fairly awful, in both the original and current senses of the word),
then you will understand that radically simplifying SGML is a task as
huge and as ultimately doomed as, say, radically simplifying the
English language. You can make the computer happy, but then
Shakespeare doesn't fit in there any more.

Jon

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Jon Bosak, Novell Corporate Publishing Services jb@novell.com
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