Re: [xml-dev] Fixing what's broke

[Alexander Johannesen <alexander.johannesen@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 12:15 PM, Bill Lindsey <bill@blnz.com> wrote:
> It's ugly.
> And that ugliness is largely a result of it's unnecessary verbosity.

I can't agree with this at all, and for good reason; ugliness is
subjective. Some find XML ugly, other find JSON ugly, others Java,
others LISP, and on and on it goes. I don't think the things'
engineering aspect has *anything* to do with it; either it does the
job, looks good to most, and seems to be well thought-through and
designed, or it does not. But *what* constitutes all those different
criteria is often far more subjective than we'd like to think.

And I don't think XML is ugly. (Except namespaces gone crazy, and some
aspects of character encoding.)

BTW, wanna know why I thought XML looked good to begin with? Because
of XPath 1.0, a thing of pure beauty and design. Just sayin' :)


Alex
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