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On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 11:15:26PM +0100, Sean McGrath wrote:
> At 17:54 06/05/2003 -0400, Adam Turoff wrote:
> >Sounds like Dave and Andy are throwing out the baby with the bath water,
> >and you're somewhat happy to help them do it.
>
> Take a look at RelaxNG compact syntax. Beautiful.
>
> Take a look at any of the myriad of languages that have tags for
> "if", "while" etc. Awful.
>
> XML as a native syntax is not for everything. That way lies madness.
And it is equally mad (or maddening) to eschew XML syntax and step
back five years because of some aberrant cases.
Dave and Andy have a very good point to make, but the way they make it
undervalues the role of grammar design in both XML and plaintext.
RelaxNG XML syntax may suck, and the compact syntax may be beautiful,
but it took effort to *design* a beautiful, simple plaintext syntax.
Ditto RDF/N3. Ditto YAML.
A slap-dash plaintext syntax is often *worse* than a similar XML
vocabulary, because the reliance on (raw) XML alleviates many common
problems. Doubly so if you're expecting a format's users to grovel
through a poorly design plaintext format with their own buggy
parsers or regexes.
> Getting back to Andy and Dave. They unfortunately, have plenty of
> solid ground to stand on these days when it comes to complexity
> and not-for-human-consumption arguments these days. Its now trendy
> to produce XML that is about as human readable as The Laguna
> Copperplate Inscription[1].
You're overstating their case. Dave had some positive words to
say about XML usage, especially in the small or well-designed domains:
Now, for some things there are standards. For example, there are
some standards like RSS and RDF, which give you very simple
ways of describing web page content. But a random XML file,
especially machine generated XML files, can be as obscure as
binary data.
... and XSLT:
If you're talking about using XML in certain domains, it's fine.
XSLT, for example, lets you do some really fun things with XML.
The bad end of the spectrum is certainly getting worse, but that's
not sufficient justification to "follow the trends", assert that
it's *all* bad, or even accept bad vocabulary design. The solution
here is to (1) design better vocabularies (and reject the bad ones,
when possible) and (2) avoid XML where it's inappropriate.
In that order.
Z.
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