# On SGML for URCs

Terry Allen (terry@ora.com)
Thu, 24 Mar 1994 07:19:34 PST

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    Message-Id: <199403241519.HAA25758@rock>

    From: Terry Allen <terry@ora.com>

    Date: Thu, 24 Mar 1994 07:19:34 PST

    To: uri@bunyip.com

    Subject: On SGML for URCs

| Date: Thu, 24 Mar 94 13:19:54 +0100
| From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@ptpc00.cern.ch>
| Subject: Re: LISP for Complex URC Sytax [WAS: Re URC func spec ]
|
| I agree with Simon that SGML would be the proper way to go in this
| case (horrid though it is in detail). We would have the same problem which
| we had with HTML (except worse) that the SGML crowd will want every
| URC to start <!DOCTYPE URC SYSTEM> and will want a full entity-processing
| engine behind any parser,

With commenting on the wisdom of representing URCs in SGML,
I cry foul at this remark. HTML was specified (and not by me!)
as an SGML DTD, and characters such as myself are simply insisting that
it be treated as such. The matter of whether a document type
declaration should be required has been discussed quite recently
on www-talk, and opinion is certainly divided.

| but we can do the same thing as Dan
| did for HTML, ie describe the relationship between the two carefully
| as to how you can make a URC into a valid SGML document
| for parsing, and emphasis that just because a URC can be wrapped
| up to form an SGML document conforming to a given DTD
| (whatever that realy is ;-) that doesn't mean that any SGML document
| conforming to the DTD will be a valid URC.

If you've written the DTD correctly the SGML instance will at least
be correct in structure, although the contents could be nonsense.
Couldn't that be the case with LISP?

| SGML people will complain,
| but they are on shakey ground as if they were to insist, then LISP
| would just become infinitely preferable.
|
| Maybe Dave Crocker and Dan Connolly should get together and
| rigourously define a "cleaned up" version of SGML, with the
| phase-of-the-moon white space handling Dan refers to in a
| recent message weeded out, etc, with a 1 page BNF descrition
| and 150 page optionally legible description of how to map
| between SGML and cleaned up SGML.

Tim, we've discussed this issue recently, too. We have tools
to handle SGML, but not some "cleaned up" version, so no
"cleaned up" version of SGML is feasible today. I'm not
advocating that we represent URCs in SGML, but I will continue
to object to bogus arguments against doing so.

    --
    Terry Allen  (terry@ora.com)
    Editor, Digital Media Group
    O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
    Sebastopol, Calif., 95472

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