Re: [xml-dev] Why is terseness of minimal importance?

["C. M. Sperberg-McQueen" <cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com>]

Rick Jelliffe writes:

> (So all the demand from industrial users that terseness was an essential
> feature dried up. And people who typed in text editors had little
> voice,

I'm not completely sure that's true.  I don't think I was the only
member of the working group (or the editorial review board) who had used
conventional text editors for hundreds or thousands of pages of SGML.
(Some time late in the production of the TEI Guidelines, I was inspired
by the experience of using Lennart Staflin's psgml mode to write some
Xedit macros to supply end-tags.  But probably three fourths or more of
the tags in the Guidelines source were typed by hand.

Those of us who used text editors may or may not have done a good job of
representing the interests of that class of users, but we were there and
I think it's fair to say that we were pretty vocal.  But I don't
remember that any of us saw markup minimization -- especially given
SGML's eccentric rules for it, which never failed to baffle anyone
familiar with the rudiments of parsing theory, or even with using yacc
-- as something that was helpful to us or our typing fingers.

> while those who claimed we would all use tools to shield us from the markup
> were well represented.)

I don't remember anyone taking the view that tools would shield us from
the markup.  Make it unnecessary to type all those keystrokes?
yes. Shield us from the markup?  Why would you want to shield someone
from something valuable?

-- 
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Black Mesa Technologies LLC
http://blackmesatech.com