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I don't think the syntax of XML is widely understood. How many people really know the syntax of DTDs, processing instructions, entity references, namespaces, CD
by jhpriestley 11y ago
I don't think the syntax of XML is widely understood. How many people really know the syntax of DTDs, processing instructions, entity references, namespaces, CDATA sections, and so on?
Tags-and-attributes are widely understood, and a format which was just tags-and-attributes would be a reasonably good format. XML is far too complex for its purpose.
- agentgt 11y agoI'm almost positive we have worked together (your handle stuck out... percussion?)... I agree the extension/validation parts of XML are not well understood (DTD, entity references, namespaces) but in general rarely used or needed. Most uses of XML in the past and today use just mainly tags and attributes. XML purpose was for an extensible document format not a general purpose programming language, DSL and/or a serialization format. For its original purpose it isn't a terrible format. Document formats require special handling of space and comments and repeated nodes (see my other comments). Even S-Expressions ignore spaces in general so are probably not a good format for documents.
- jhpriestley 11y agoAh, so you're that "agent". You're right, we worked at Percussion together in 2009 :)