RE: [xml-dev] Wikipedia on XML

["Len Bullard" <cbullard@hiwaay.net>]

That you can make the statement that it is true but can be rejected says it
is a complex beastie in practice regardless of simplifications in the
explanation to make it appear otherwise.

Extensibility is the crux of why it isn't simple.  If the wikipedia article
is to be both correct and understandable, drop the pretense that it is
simple in practice.

len


From: Amelia A Lewis [mailto:amyzing@talsever.com] 

So ... I'd lean in the direction of *rejecting* the argument that XML 
is a complex beastie that provides tools for defining markup 
languages.  That's certainly true, but it's equally true that there are 
markup languages that are clearly *XML* without much formal 
definition.  In fact, there are probably quite a lot of "little" 
languages (for configuration and the like) that are almost entirely 
undocumented (and which default to "mustignore" semantics, for the most 
part).

You can verify well-formedness without any knowledge of what's in the 
document, without knowing anything about any particular elements or 
attributes.  You have named elements, named attributes; these have 
standard syntax.  The XML spec doesn't specify what any of them are; 
it's extensible that way.  You have comments and processing 
instructions; these have standard syntax.  Again, there's no definition 
of what's *in* them; that's an extension point.

It's an extensible markup language.  Keep it simple.