[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
Dare Obasanjo wrote:
> S-exprs are equivalent to XML for a large class of XML users. First of all if you think about why most people use XML you'll realize it's mostly because of the network effect and not anything intrinsically fantastic about angle brackets. In working with XML I've seen two broad classes of XML users those who want to represent structured data [database exportation and unified query, web services, RSS feeds, config files, etc] and those who actually want to mark up content. Most of the former do not need XML features like PIs, entities or encodings and in fact tend to shun them.
The rest of your commentary aside, anyone who feels that for *any*
application, they don't need encodings (and by implication to think
about i18n) is probably dangerously wrong. I might be inclined to
argue that the chief technical advantage of XML over S-expressions,
SGML, ASN.1, tab-delimited files or pretty well anything else is that it
really pressures you think about i18n.
There was a really interesting posting from Larry Wall recently in the
context of the perl6 design, remarking that anyone who in this day and
age includes the idiom "[a-zA-Z]" in a regular expression has quite
likely just uttered a bug. -Tim
|
