Re: XML

["Ralf S. Engelschall" <nospam@thanx>]

On Fri, Jun 26, 1998, Ben Hochstedler wrote:

> What are your plans for WML in regards to XML?  Do you plan
> on supporting XML?  If so, do you plan on taking out the
> features WML duplicates, or do you plan on keeping any
> duplicate features and simply providing XML as another 
> way to do them?

Hmmmm.. I've followed the XML-stuff of the W3C only sparingly.  Ok, XML now is
standardized, but as I know, there are no real applications available (like
HTML for SGML). Only a few Java-based parsers and other experimental stuff is
available. Only Mozilla 5 should contain some XML-parsing stuff. But because
the complete XML-topic is still in experimental stage, I've never though in
the past that it is already interesting for WML. But perhaps time has changed
now.  So, what concrete support for XML do think WML should have in the
future?

OTOH my plans for WML are the following: WML 1.x will be maintained by me at
least for the next year but only enhanced slightly (because the implementation
cannot be made a lot better this way and plans for WML 2.x are already in
progress). Until then I hope that WML 2.x is available which is based on the
tool I currently create as a prototype in my diploma thesis. And for this tool
maximum speed and generality in usage is my primary goal (because what WML 1.x
really lacks is performance). In other words: XML is one goal for WML 2.x,
too. Yes. But perhaps it is easy to add XML support to WML 1.x and we can do
it easily.  As long as it is possible for me to add it with my available time,
I'll do it. And when someone contributes a patch we can have it in 1.x, of
course.

But first we have to know what exact support for generating XML-based markup
is needed in WML (please help us here with examples and hints). Then we can
decide how much work it is.

Greetings,
                                       Ralf S. Engelschall
                                       rse@engelschall.com
                                       www.engelschall.com
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