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

[Max Toro <maxtoroq@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Pete Cordell <petexmldev@codalogic.com> wrote:
> Original Message From: "Max Toro"
>>
>> On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 11:48 AM, Pete Cordell  wrote:
>>>
>>> Original Message From: "Max Toro"
>>>>
>>>>> I've put in a number of posts what I think the benefits of the change
>>>>> are. I
>>>>> also think that in a mobile and wireless world, especially where we
>>>>> have
>>>>> small intelligent devices like body area networks, zigbee and, in the
>>>>> future, corn flake packets telling us when they're empty that we can't
>>>>> just
>>>>> assume that memory is free, and bandwidth unlimited.
>>>>>
>>>>> What do you see as the benefits of always insisting that everyone does
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> <trajectory:initialVelocityVarianceCoefficient>1</trajectory:initialVelocityVarianceCoefficient>?
>>>>
>>>> application/x-www-form-urlencoded and JSON are more condensed
>>>> representations, if that's what you are looking for.
>>>> If you change XML to fit every possible use case it's going to make it
>>>> worse.
>>>
>>> Worse in what way?
>>
>> More complex to understand.
>
> I'm afraid I don't buy that.  It's always worth being aware of incremental
> complexity, but this is nothing compared to what you have to understand to
> write code these days.  If it saved you having to understand
> application/x-www-form-urlencoded and JSON as well then it's actually easier
> to understand.

Because to write code these days you need to understand a lot of
things then every little change that adds more complexity than actual
value should be avoided. Adding your closing tag proposal means there
would be more than one way to read and write a closing tag, when only
one way is required, and the long way is much more readable when you
read down and up. And more importantly, </> is not backwards
compatible.

If you need a more condensed format for data-centric documents why not
use a different representation, like JSON, which you can transform to
XML if you like to process with XML-aware tools. Or, if you want to
stick with XML you can use attributes.
--
Max Toro