Re: [xml-dev] Why XML?

[Arjun Ray <aray@nyct.net>]

"Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@allette.com.au> wrote:
| From: "David Megginson" <david@megginson.com>

 [on orthogonality of features in language design]
 
|> It's clearly a principle rarely put into practice (
| 
| Its clearly a completely bogus principle!  In fact, for markup languages
| the reverse is true: having more forms makes data capture and modeling 
| easier because you can choose the form that requires the least work. 

True.

| E.g. (<![CDATA[ ]]> or  &amp; )

I've always wondered about this choice among baroque syntaxes.  Too bad
MSSCHAR wasn't suitably redefined for XML.

| and (element or attribute) 

A permathread.

| and (<x></x> or <x/>) 

I think losing EMPTY declared content in syntax was a mistake.

| and ( y="z" or y='z'). 

Here I'm almost positive XML goofed.  This could have been exploited
profitably to distinguish CDATA from tokenizable attribute values.  (It's
a loss only for playing PE games with strings in the DTD.)

| The other bogus principle is that there should only be one syntax for 
| everything.

Like pointy brackets? ;-)