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

[rjelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>]

 On Sun, 05 Dec 2010 17:15:14 -0800, Bill Lindsey <bill@blnz.com> wrote:
> If I were to get interested in an effort to update XML, it would have
> to be because I saw a chance to address the what I think is it's
> biggest problem:
>
> It's ugly.
>
> And that ugliness is largely a result of it's unnecessary verbosity.
>
> Engineers (I'm one) tend to value concision in expression and XML's
> requirement for named end tags usually just adds noise.

 Hrumph. An engineer should perhaps ask "what problem is this solving?" 
 before passing judgment based on ugliness.

 One problem that explicit end-tags address is how to keep track of 
 scoping in very large documents. The languages which have brackets (like 
 C-style { }) run up against a wall with large documents: making a virtue 
 out of a necessity, the bracketing languages provide facilities for 
 keeping individual file sizes down: macros, functions, classes, etc.  A 
 deeply nested C syntax file of several meg in size might be considered 
 unmaintainable and bad form, but a deeply nested XML file of several 
 megabytes is not so rare and presents no particular difficulty for 
 editing and processing.

 In order to call this "unnecessary", you first have to say either that 
 the use case is not required, or show that in fact XML's features didn't 
 help in this use case.

 And, in an case, there is an alternative syntax available for end-tags 
 (from SGML natch), which is  </>.


 Cheers
 Rick Jelliffe