[DOC-SIG] What I don't like about SGML

[Fred L. Drake]

Guido van Rossum writes:
 > First, while SGML may have been standardized in the swinging '80s, it
 > definitely has its roots in the '70s -- it takes many years to become
 > an international standard (look at C++!), and it started its life, as
 > "GML", long before standardization started.  Undoubtedly some of the
 > worse features in SGML were designed to be backwards compatible

  Have you used GML?  I have.  It was probably nice when it was new,
but certainly was showing problems by the time I used it.  Script/VS
(the processor I used) also allowed "control words" which looked a lot 
like troff dot-commands.  I ended up using a lot of these because the
mechanisms for defining new logical markup were very poorly documented 
as far as I could tell.  I had to define macros on top of the
Script/VS control words.
  The SGML is see now has definately evolved a long way from those
roots, though the better aspects of GML are still there (structure).
I don't think the GML background of SGML can be meaningfully held up
as a problem with SGML; I think Goldfarb learned a lot from GML's
failures when by the time SGML was defined.


  -Fred

--
Fred L. Drake, Jr.
fdrake@cnri.reston.va.us
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
1895 Preston White Drive
Reston, VA    20191-5434

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