Re: [xml-dev] seduced by markup

[John Cowan <johnwcowan@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 4:32 PM, Steve Newcomb <srn@coolheads.com> wrote:

The DTD syntax was never about machines.  It was about human beings, and
it is still, even today, and as crummy as it is, the most humane way
available for human beings to communicate about data design in a diverse
collaborative environment that inevitably must include non-programmers.

In my opinion, RELAX NG compact syntax is far more humane than DTDs.  It is as readable, if not more so; it has greater power; it has far fewer arbitrary restrictions.

 

If the purpose of a programmer's task is to make machines facilitate
human communication, nobody should care how hard that task is, least of
all the programmers

Perhaps not the programmers, but definitely the people who pay the bills, because

hard = expensive.

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