Fair enough. OTFOH, is it like DTDs, a matter of when and where
you use them and for what? If for the sake of performance,
clear text based standards must resolve to a binary standard
(ie, the player only knows how to play a binary), then it may
be the case that ANY clear text representation works as long as
the values of the properties expressed are equivalent. In other
words, the curly vs pointy bracket debates are only important
to the loader. For that situation, what kind of standard
expression is most useful for the sake of getting agreement on
the application standard? For many years many of us relied on
DTDs to do this and it worked pretty well. Now we have the
concept of the well-formed (context-free) file. Because this
approach is espoused on several lists now, and XML is touted as
the example, the answers to these questions become more important.
If answered, it might avoid a lot of work for a lot of people
for a long time.
len