From: Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu
[mailto:Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu]
On Thu, 22 Feb 2001 21:01:23 EST, you said:
I am not sure I agree with the statement that in 10 years XML will
be history. One of XML's greatest values is in the fact that it is a
good format for long-term archiving of written material. Some very
old material (several millenia old) is available in XML format --
that's more than the 32 years for RFC1. ;-) The reason old text has
been converted to XML is not so that people can read it on a GameBoy,
but so that it can be archived, indexed, converted to other
formats, etc.
1) Was your millenia-old data *written in XML*, or was it
*converted to* XML
within the past 5 years?
Duh!? ;-) Obviously, this is a rhetorical question.
2) Will you be able to find the DTD you need in 2035?
Well-formed XML documents still have value even without a DTD. It's usually
pretty easy to guess at what the elements mean. If the documents are of value
to a lot of people at the time, then yes, you probably will be able to find the
DTD and one or more style sheets. If it's just a historical document, then
maybe or maybe not. I'll bet that you'd be able to find a plain text rendering
of the document, though.
An alternative point of view is that in 10 years XML will have
achieved a
critical mass, so that it becomes as entrenched as many other standards:
ASCII, TCP/IP, C, etc.
OK.. Wake me up in 2011 and I'll be MORE than happy to reconsider. ;)
I don't have a crystal ball, and I have been around long enough to have seen
fads come and go. XML seems to me to strike the right balance between
simplicity and value-add, so that I would consider it a pretty safe bet for the
long-term as a document format. Anyway, I don't expect that the IETF will be
moving from plain text to any other format for years, if ever. For the most
part, this discussion is academic.
Here's a proposal though: how about multipart/alternative! ;-) Seriously,
storage is incredibly cheap. Why not store documents in several formats? If
the plain text rendering is the normative document, I don't think anyone would
have a problem with that. Perhaps the RFC editor could accept documents using
the DTD from M Rose as well as the normative plain text format. I'm not
suggesting that the editor take on a lot of new work, just that XML documents,
when submitted by authors, be made available from the Web.
BTW, I have always liked the layout of the RFCs -- namely, that they are nicely
paginated with page numbers and headers. On the other hand, HTML often doesn't
print very well.
--
Doug Sauder