Re: XML for linguists?

Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
>
> On Mon, 22 Nov 1999, David G. Durand wrote:
> > XML is like full SGML (not a tagset, but a full definition language with
> > DTDs and everything), but it's had 90% of the cruft from SGML stripped out.
> Moreover, it's really, really easy to work with XML, and gives a lot
> of pleasure. It seems that inside SGML there was something elegant
> and small struggling to get out...
I looked at XML again after reading all this discussion;
now it looks to me like "just" a syntax for a metalanguage,
without any actual content. It merely imposes a tree-structure
using what amount to circumfixes with attribute tags.
The real value-added part is the DTD (?) which we ain't got.

I still don't quite see how to apply this to my old idea of
an interchange format for constructed languages. Somewhere
there may be a definition of language as that which is
its own metalanguage, or some other Godel-like constraint
that makes it impossible to accomplish.