Re: [xml-dev] seduced by markup

[Michael Sokolov <msokolov@safaribooksonline.com>]

On 11/15/2013 01:34 PM, Pete Cordell wrote:
> Plus I think coding activity (at least traditionally) is all about 
> organising stuff and constraining chaos.  Even on a good day, when 
> you've dotted all your "I"s and crossed all your "T"s, things rarely 
> go as well as you'd hope.  Thus when something with a "name" parameter 
> is added to a system they want to quickly answer unequivocally "which 
> name is that?" and bolt it down as quickly as possible to limit the 
> increased entropy.  The XML practitioners approach seems to be "Yo, 
> more names. Cool.  We'll put you over here to start with, but we might 
> move you later."
>
> Kind of like getting someone with OCD and a pot smoking hippy to work 
> together!
There's OCD stuff in the XML world too, and it was there right from the 
start, it just has a different flavor: DTD. The whole "DOCTYPE must be 
conveyed with the document" religion created the concept of a document 
that isn't complete without being processed by its accompanying DTD.  
The result is a programmer's nightmare, but makes sense to a certain 
kind of document purist.

-Mike