Re: [xml-dev] How long before services sending/receiving XML might need

[Norman Gray <norman.gray@glasgow.ac.uk>]

Greetings.

On 12 Nov 2021, at 8:12, Marcus Reichardt wrote:

> I think XML has a stronghold still in digital/cross-media publishing, but it's time to review the purpose of XML, or maybe find a new SGML subset or extension to bring markup back in line with what's actually needed, such as an archival format (where XML may work well), an intermediate format in publishing pipelines (ditto), or

I don't think the 'purpose' of XML has changed (and I have 'purpose' deliberately in scare-quotes there).

It is, as it always was, a way of overlaying explicit structure onto text.  In the 00s it was also used (and I think widely _abused_) as a means of serialising objects and messaging.  It can work for that purpose, and for certain types of large object/message it's the right solution, but for simple or small messages, it's unattractively cumbersome, and a less good solution than, for example, JSON.  It only because used for serialisation and messaging because there wasn't, at that precise time, an obvious better alternative.  There were other remarks on this in the 'over-engineered' thread here, a few months ago.

So XML is still arguably a good solution for the cases it was initially designed for, and what's happening now is that the cruft of misapplications of XML is falling away.

> an authoring format (where XML is a poor choice considering digital text is written in markdown and other Wiki syntax formats).

Well... some digital text.  Markdown and wiki-type syntax are good for simple texts, but rapidly run out of steam.

Tangentially:

>  The features dropped from SGML to yield XML (tag inference, short references and other shortform syntax) were adequate for XML as delivery format; but at the same time, their lack is what gave way to a thousand ad-hoc syntaxes invented by people who actually want to write text without excessive boilerplate a la XML. It's time to stop this fixation on (the incidental SGML subset that is) XML and consider/preserve the larger markup tech context.

Though I'll accuse and convict myself of a certain amount of ad-hockery here, the format I've drifted towards for my own lecture notes is a mutant of XML and LaTeX: the overall structuring is XML, and the paragraph-level markup is LaTeX.  I've explored (eg) pandoc markup for texts like this and... nahhhh.

Best wishes,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  https://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK