Quote:
Originally Posted by twobits
There is only one SGML actually. It is an ISO standard now and descended from GML.
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Potaytoe, potahtoe. SGML is an ISO standard technology for defining markup languages. HTML is an SGML-based language. I guess I should have used the word "dialect" to be pedantic, though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by twobits
It is not a dialect of XML but a DTD for XML.
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I've never heard of anyone who didn't use those terms interchangeably. A dialect of XML generally means a markup language based on XML that conforms to a particular DTD.
Quote:
Originally Posted by twobits
At first html was only modeled on sgml, but was more adhoc then sgml allowed. It was not until later (4.0 or 3.2 can't recall which off hand) that it was given a formal dtd that made it true sgml.
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True. Early HTML was... a big pile of hurt.
Quote:
Originally Posted by twobits
Actually XSLT is a Turing complete language. To use it you usually also need to learn XQuery and XPath.
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Worse, it's a Turing complete template language. To use it, you have to wrap your head around the concept of template-based languages, which inherently have no real notion of state. It is enough to cause brain damage in programmers, in much the same way that LaTeX does, and for precisely the same reason.
Put another way, even though I've modified XSLT for transforming XML to other output formats many times over the years, when I'm asked to write such a tool from scratch, I invariably end up writing it in Perl or C or some other actual programming language rather than a template language like XSLT. (Or, occasionally, Bourne shell scripts, if I want to cause people nightmares that they never wake up from.
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