compliments and comments from a competitor

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

I mentioned KDL in another message.  Their main page - https://kdl.dev/ 
- has a section comparing their work to other approaches, and their 
notes on XML resonated for me.

> What about XML?
> XML is actually pretty fantastic, and has long been a standard for 
> data exchange across many industries. At the same time, XML is known 
> to be very verbose, and editing it involves writing (and updating) 
> matching tags. Another large pitfall with XML is its lack of direct 
> support for arbitrary string key/value pairs, so what would be a 
> simple foo: x in some languages has to be represented as <entry 
> name="foo" value="x" /> or something similar. XML also functions great 
> as a markup language. That is, it is easy to intersperse with text, 
> like HTML.
>
> KDL, just like XML, is a node/element-based language, but with much 
> more lightweight syntax. It also adds the ability to apply anonymous 
> values directly to a node, rather than as children. That is, nodename 
> 1 2 3 instead of 
> <element><child>1</child><child>2</child>(etc)</element>. This can 
> make it much more manageable and readable as a human configuration 
> language, and is also less verbose when exchanging documents across APIs!
>
> Finally, KDL is not a markup language. XML or HTML do a much better 
> job of "marking up" a text document with special tags, although KDL 
> can still be useful for templating engines that want to be more strict 
> about text fragments.
>
> If you need to interoperate with a service that consumes or emits XML, 
> or for some other reason have need to write "XML in KDL", we have XiK, 
> an official microsyntax for losslessly encoding XML.
Thanks,
Simon