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> SGML complexity is a myth. You can code a parser in about one man-year, with optional features (SHORTREF, LINK, web bindings) taking another half (source: hav

> SGML complexity is a myth. You can code a parser in about one man-year, with optional features (SHORTREF, LINK, web bindings) taking another half (source: have done it [1]). You’re waaaay off base if you think these figures make SGML complexity a myth. https://bundlephobia.com/package/sgml@0.2.1-beta https://bundlephobia.com/package/sgml@0.2.1-beta shows sgml.js to be about 400KB of minified code, and the bundle also contains sgml-ua.min.js which is 400KB but I think a different 400KB, and a simple line count shows sgml-ua.js and everything-else to each be around 18,000 lines excluding comments. You can implement XML (https://www.w3.org/TR/xml/ https://www.w3.org/TR/xml/) minus doctypes in a couple of hours, no trouble. You can add doctypes (including remote fetching, assuming an HTTP library) and validation in less than the remainder of a man-day. Be generous about doing a bang-up job of it all, and you’ll still easily be done in under a week. (And in a language like JavaScript, it’d probably be a couple of thousand lines at the most, depending of course on how you choose to model it all; possibly under 500.) SGML is very complex compared with XML. SGML has departed like Jehoram of old: to no one’s regret.

tannhaeuser 4y ago
sgmljs.net also bundles a markdown parser, a DTD for W3C HTML 5.2 (a really long string), SGML declaration support, loads of diagnostic messages, an URL parser, SGML LINK with pipelining and templating, implementations for a couple of (HyTime general arch) formal system identifiers such as for date and CSV parsing/formatting, plus a couple other things. It has essentially no external dependencies. The XML subset of SGML is simpler (that's the entire point of it) but implementing DOCTYPEs with the subset of markup declarations supported by XML still will take you much more than "the remainder of a man-day" LOL. Yes unlike with SGML, you can use an off-the-shelf regexp lib to perform actual checking, but you still need to perform model admissibility/ambiguousness checking with halfway usable diagnostics, and require hundreds of test cases. XML might be ok as a markup delivery format (that didn't make it on the web), but it absolutely doesn't begin to meet the bar of an authoring format. If it were, nobody would be using markdown, MediaWiki syntax, or other custom Wiki syntax, and your collection of helper apps and CMSs, template engines, and whatnot. All of which is included in SGML. (Still, I upvoted your comment FWIW)

tannhaeuser 4y ago

sgmljs.net also bundles a markdown parser, a DTD for W3C HTML 5.2 (a really long string), SGML declaration support, loads of diagnostic messages, an URL parser, SGML LINK with pipelining and templating, implementations for a couple of (HyTime general arch) formal system identifiers such as for date and CSV parsing/formatting, plus a couple other things. It has essentially no external dependencies. The XML subset of SGML is simpler (that's the entire point of it) but implementing DOCTYPEs with the subset of markup declarations supported by XML still will take you much more than "the remainder of a man-day" LOL. Yes unlike with SGML, you can use an off-the-shelf regexp lib to perform actual checking, but you still need to perform model admissibility/ambiguousness checking with halfway usable diagnostics, and require hundreds of test cases. XML might be ok as a markup delivery format (that didn't make it on the web), but it absolutely doesn't begin to meet the bar of an authoring format. If it were, nobody would be using markdown, MediaWiki syntax, or other custom Wiki syntax, and your collection of helper apps and CMSs, template engines, and whatnot. All of which is included in SGML. (Still, I upvoted your comment FWIW)