::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[Alaric Snell]

On Tuesday 05 February 2002 16:17, you wrote:

> It seems like in most cases, file formats are either:
>
>   * open [ascii, jpg, etc] in which case the code to read & write such
[...]
>   * or proprietary [doc, xls, ppt] in which case some organization is
[...]

No matter what technology provides, this will always be the case. People are 
already producing closed XML with single-letter element names. You can pick 
out the tree structure rather than seeing just a string of bits, yeah, but 
that's all you get! And even worse, some people (including the W3C) are 
mandating non-XML encodings for things embedded in XML, so you can call it 
'XML' and get marketing points for 'open standards' but it's really 'XML 
wrapping $other-format'. See XPath, XQuery, and XPointer for examples! Not to 
mention CSS and the DTD format...

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software