> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>
> 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 If it's just a historical document, then maybe or maybe not.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
