Re: [xml-dev] Is "Hand Authoring" XML still a critical use case ?

[Mike Sokolov <sokolov@ifactory.com>]

I'm not sure what difference it makes whether people use 
high-functioning tools or impoverished ones to edit XML. Are you 
imagining changing XML in some way that would make it impossible to edit 
with a non-XML-aware text editor? I think it extremely unlikely that 
would happen, and think that would actually be a huge mistake if it did.

Personally, I edit a fair amount of XML "by hand" (that's emacs w/nxml 
mode); mostly XSLT, but sometimes configuration files, and 
process-control documents in our internal formats. Folks writing Xproc 
are probably writing "by hand" (although I think there was some idea to 
create a diagram-based editor).

-Mike

On 12/09/2010 02:15 PM, David Lee wrote:
> I argue the readability and writability are *totally different*.
> I read XML ALL DAY and for me its #1 appeal s a format is that its humanly
> readable.
> that’s not at all the same as 'easily written'.
>
>
> However I rarely write directly in it, except for very tiny bits.
> ( e.g. preparing my Docbook-like papers for submission to Balisage is a real
> challenge for me, and I'm an xml-geek) .
>
>
> I'm not actually proposing that XML should not consider hand editing.
> I'm suggesting that many of the discussions this week have been around the
> concept of "whats easier to write",
> and I'm throughing a strawman out that maybe that’s not the most important
> criteria,.
>
>
> ----------------------------------------
> David A. Lee
> dlee@calldei.com
> http://www.xmlsh.org
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bjoern Hoehrmann [mailto:derhoermi@gmx.net]
> Sent: Thursday, December 09, 2010 2:12 PM
> To: David Lee
> Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Is "Hand Authoring" XML still a critical use case ?
>
>
> * David Lee wrote:
>    
>> Is Hand Authored XML really an important issue nowadays ?
>>      
> That's a silly question, as close human contact with the source code
> varies with applications. Close encounters with XHTML are more common
> than close encounters with Atom or XMPP, for instance. I myself use
> XML as quick and dirty serialization format for debugging purposes;
> that's not authoring by hand, but I have to read it without any tool
> assistance and the requirements are similar.
>