Shlomi:
hi all, see https://www.shlomifish.org/meta/FAQ/why_xml.xhtml : …[snip]… what do you think?
I think that I am glad you articulated these reasons. They overlap with my reasons, and your words help me explain myself to my skeptics.
However, when you wrote this:
Now, with respect to HTML 5, the Markdowns and AsciiDoc, while I use them sometimes, they are less structured and more errorprone than many XML grammars, and often are not semantic enough for all my use cases.
… my first reaction was, are you using an XML-aware editor to do
your data entry? Because one source of pushback against XML
languages and in favour of markdowns and AsciiDoc, which I
encounter in projects, is the assumption that we can only expect
authors to use plain text editors, with no XML syntax support. And
in a plain text editor, I think it genuinely is easier — less
errorprone — to author in a markdown language or in AsciiDoc.
Also, the complement to "less structured" is "less complex". I
know one project where some doc maintainers are proposing
switching away from the XML-based DocBook language, to AsciiDoc,
because there are so many entities and "more structured"
capabilities that it is complex to figure out for a casual
contributor. These maintainers judge that it is better to have
less structure but to be accessible to casual contributors of
documentation improvements.
You might want to consider addressing these points in your essay.
I hope this is the kind of helpful feedback you are looking for.
Best regards,
—Jim DeLaHunt
. --Jim DeLaHunt, jdlh@jdlh.com http://blog.jdlh.com/ (http://jdlh.com/)
multilingual websites consultant
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