(Elliotte Rusty Harold) writes:
>For what it's worth I don't think you were wrong. I personally find
>the RELAX NG XML syntax *much* easier to read, understand, and write
>than the compact syntax. Perhaps that's a function of my relative
>unfamiliarity with RELAX NG compared to you, but that's the point of
>XML's verboseness, isn't it? It's easier for a non-expert to
>understand any given format.
I think it depends a lot on scale and situation.
This was a case where there were lots and lots of parts, entering the
information quickly was much easier in the compact form, and teaching
yet another XML vocabulary didn't seem like a great idea.
With the compact syntax, I was able to walk the schema creator from
their spreadsheet to a simple list to the compact syntax with a minimum
number of roundabout steps.
(Yes, I could also have done something similar with DTDs, but then I
would have had to explain entities as something separate from patterns
and couldn't have used the data types they'd already chosen.)
