MinML: an experimental, more concise meta-syntax for XML and HTML

[Ford Bryan <bryan.ford@epfl.ch>]

Hi everyone,

I thought this new blog post might be of interest to members of this mailing list:

MinML: concise but general markup syntax

https://bford.info/2022/12/28/minml/ 

It’s about an experimental alternative markup meta-syntax that you might say tries to answer questions like… “Could we have a markup syntax with the power of XML but more terse and easier to read and write?”  

Or, perhaps a bit more provocatively…  “Could XML be made relevant again, as a *human-writable* markup framework, in the face of today’s competition from the army of Markdown and JSON variants?”

The above blog post was written in the proposed MinML meta-syntax, using HTML elements.  I’ve been finding it quite concise and convenient (more so than Markdown for some constructs), while affecting only the outermost meta-syntax and not the essential structure of XML or the elements we have to play with.  

I hope something like this might be of interest to anyone who likes the power and generality of XML but would just like a more terse syntax that’s cross-convertible with XML.  It’s a work in progress, though: important issues remain, such as how to deal with the whole DTD mess (if at all) in MinML syntax.  Thoughts/feedback welcome.

Cheers

Bryan

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