[rfc-i] New proposal for "canonical and others"

[brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)]

On 2012-06-17 10:16, Martin J. D?rst wrote:
> On 2012/06/17 18:10, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> 
>> Down level again, draft-hoffman-rfcformat-canon-others-02 seems
>> to assume that XML is a stable format, unlike HTML. I'm not so sure
>> about that; we might have to regress another level and say that
>> our format is defined in SGML (even if, in practice, it is based
>> on a specific version of some dialect of SGML such as a current
>> version of XML or HTML).
> 
> Oh, no, please. SGML has lots of nobs to turn and tweak that proved to
> be virtually useless (you can choose other characters in place of '<'
> and '>', and so on) or outright counterproductive. And while it's not
> dead, XML is way more straightforward, with many more (and way cheaper)
> tools.

I know. I'm talking about an abstraction; I don't suggest that we should
actually write our own SGML, but simply cite SGML as the root of the syntax
realised by whatever *ML we actually use.

   Brian