Jon Bosak’s closing keynote from XML Conference 2006 has just been posted. It’s worth reading for anyone interested in XML history (or XML for that matter). It’s also worth noting as a member of that rare breed of documents that manages to combine the phrases “very famous seventeenth-century poem”, “ingrained in SGML consciousness”, “the Kantian distinction between noumena and phenomena”, and “DSSSL.”
via: David Megginson.
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You mean, some very statistically improbable phrases :-)
Ha! Arto, you're right on!
It is interesting that this presentation reveals as much as anything the intense cliqueishness and historical myopia of the XML inventors as much as anything else. The USAMICOM IADS and Unisys IDE/AS hypertext browsers were already running without DTDs using a stylesheet driven system. It was that fact (and the very low cost - free) that caused it to be preferred in some circles to the expensive and slavishly SGML EBT product. It was IADS that was presented to NIST as proof that DTD-less hypertext based on markup was a real technology. At the time, the SGML community had pounded the IADS developers openly on lists to deride that approach.
In some ways, the 27 page paper was proof of the social locales and limitations of its originators in that in part it only documented the uncredited work of a different social group and locale. It is the lesson of web history that proves if one is actually interested in innovation, it is often better to ignore the established community and patent and copyright. These protect not only investments, but history itself.