[KLUG Members] XML is not a document standard -- WAS: XSLT Transforms

[Bryan J. Smith]

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On Wed, 2003-01-15 at 23:45, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> Remember, XML is a template syntax, and nothing more on its own.  You
> need a lot of support DTDs, schema, namespace and other details, just
> for content definition.

I want to re-cover and re-emphasize this point.

XML is not a document standard.

The W3C (among others) created XML as a syntax standard so vendors,
organizations and other parties can create their own, independent
document standards, outside of the W3C standardization process.

XML on its own is basically useless, undefined content surrounded in a
syntax of tags.

Additional Document Template Definitions (DTDs), support XML schema and
namespace are required to define content and XSL stylesheets are
required to render a document into a usable, hardcopy publishable form.

OASIS is involved with the submission and standardization efforts of
many independent XML standards.

"DocBook" is a set of DTDs for OASIS XML/XSL content/style (and
deprecated SGML/DSSSL) standard for technical documentation.

"xmloff" is a set of DTDs for OpenOffice XML content w/style which has
been submitted to OASIS by Sun, Corel, Arbortext and Boeing.

Many other applications have varying levels of XML complexity.  From
simple XML free-form content (useless, no standardization) to DTDs,
namespace, and basis in other, pre-XML/XML re-invented standards (e.g.,
Gnome Dia's XML uses UML which now has XML DTDs).

Microsoft's XML efforts through Office XP (aka 2002 aka v10) are
completely free-form, export-only (useless, no standardization).

Microsoft's Office .NET (aka v11) XML efforts are actually defining DTDs
for XML, common namespace and a wide set of XSLTs for the Office product
family.  But these XML efforts are only for extracting content from
Office documents for web/active-content publication -- again, largely
export-only with some limited document modification.  The underlying
Office v11 formats are still quite binary, proprietary and dynamically
defined in software code.  Microsoft has begun to refer to market these
formats as "binary XML" or "compiled XML" and will never disclose them.


--=20
Bryan J. Smith, E.I. (BSECE)       Contact Info:  http://thebs.org
[ http://thebs.org/files/resume/BryanJonSmith_certifications.pdf ]
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