At 07:21 PM 12/18/97 +0000, Rob Hartill wrote:
>On Thu, 18 Dec 1997, sameer wrote:
>> I know zippo about xml?
>
>same here, but if it's something MS like and want to promote then
>I'm happy not knowing. You can be sure they're only supporting 'X'
>because it's at the expense of a better 'Y', where 'Y' is something
>MS missed out out claiming as their own.
Whoa, look out for jerking knees!
XML is a GOOD thing. It's what the SGML folks had been claiming SGML was
all along, yet much easier to understand and implement. That is, a
metaformat for describing structured document formats. It's being pursued
as a way to describe data at a high level and leave the sorting, searching,
and formatting functionality up to the local client rather than the remote
server.
I haven't followed XML closely recently but what I've tangentially seen
suggests they're on the same course. XML is just another data format; a
"mod_xml" might be a parser which converts a raw XML file into
pretty-formatted HTML based on a mapping from XML to HTML elements.
And from what I've heard it's being considered as a future standard file
format for things like MS Excel and Access. I dunno about you, but I like
the idea of documented file formats.
Brian
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specialization is for insects brian@organic.com
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