FYI item 4 in the list of goals of XML is What is meant by "easy to write programs processing XML documents"? To implement an XML parser from scratch? In that case, I guess it's relatively safe to say this is neither very easy nor relevant since, fortunately you might say, nobody is creating XML parsers from scratch. But when using a parser library anyway, then processing XML is exactly as complicated as processing SGML since the parser lib does the heavy lifting, and emits just the same SAX events in both cases. From what I gather by eg [1], "easy to implement" comes from a hope that there could be more than a single implementation. Fortunately, that has been taken care of for SGML now ;) But still, what does "simplicity" buy you if nearly nobody writes XML documents by hand, and you need an elaborate preprocessing pipeline and/or editor magic anyway? Clearly, one needs to distinguish markup as a delivery or archival format vs markup as an authoring format, with the latter having much more affordances for text entry of the kind that SGML has, such as tag inference, short references, markup delimiter customization, and advanced entity uses. This leaves XML as a delivery format (as opposed to SGML in its full glory being an authoring format). But even as a delivery format, XML goal number 0 (as in paragraph 1, sentence 2 of the XML spec abstract) hasn't been achieved: sgml.io Am 04.06.2023 um 16:48 schrieb C. M. Sperberg-McQueen <cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com>:
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