XMLK: A blast from the pasthttp://norman.walsh.name/2005/12/16/xmlk81622005-12-16T09:29:32-05:00$Date: 2006-01-06 12:48:30 -0500 (Fri, 06 Jan 2006) $NormanWalsh2005Norman WalshBack in 2003, there was a flurry of discussion about “simplifying”
XML. Last night, Tim asked me about a proposal that I'd made. It took me
a while, but I finally found it.Back in 2002 and 2003, there was a flurry of
discussion about “simplifying” XML. It fell to the
TAG
under the rubric
xmlProfiles-29.
As I recall, some of us were worried about a loss of interoperability
if specifications began to follow the lead of
SOAP
and accepted only a subset of
XML.
SOAP doesn't allow a
doctypedecl,
which is clearly part of the grammar of XML, and so it's possible to
argue that SOAP doesn't use XML. I'm sure I've made that argument on
occasion.One possibility we explored to address this concern was to
define a subset of XML and give it a name. This, we hoped, would allow
everyone who wanted to subset XML to agree on the same subset and
thus preserve interoperability.I forget exactly what motivated me, but one afternoon I set out
to write the smallest subset specification I
could. I posted the result to the W3C member-only TAG mailing list,
and
we
discussed it. I even got an action to publish my specification
on the public TAG mailing list.Fast forward almost three years and nothing has really changed.
An official subset has never been developed, but neither have the
interoperability problems we feared.Anyway, last night Tim asked me
for a pointer to my minimal specification. My local copy was easy to
find, but why couldn't Google find it on the web? Because apparently I
never completed my action
item! I
described
it on xml-dev, so it did wind up in a public
space, but not as a specification.So here, for posterity, is the
XMLK specification
I wrote. Now we just have to wait and see what Tim's writing about. :-)