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

[Norman Gray <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk>]

Greetings,

On 2010 Dec 12, at 00:52, Max Toro wrote:

> 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.

This seems a good point at which to chip in a link to a long-term hobby project of mine: http://nxg.me.uk/dist/lx/

Lx defines a much-compressed syntax for XML, which is still XML in the sense that parsing it produces a sequence of (Java) SAX events.

For example, the identity transform looks like this:

;; The XSLT identity transformation
(lx:namespace ((#f "http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";))
  (stylesheet version: 1.0
    (template match: "node()|@*"
      (copy
        (apply-templates select: "@*|node()")))))

This would be hideous for document-centric markup, but is excellent for those cases -- XSLT is a fine example -- where there's more markup than text.  It becomes valuable simply because you can see more of the content on the screen at once.

For what it's worth, I think that permitting </> would be a mistake.  It's a step in the same (useful) direction as this, but is too half-hearted to be worth bothering about.

Best wishes,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk