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Is that all you can say? It does exist, but it isn't much better than it was in v4. A few more canned tags; big deal. I wonder why the minor syntactic differenc

Is that all you can say? It does exist, but it isn't much better than it was in v4. A few more canned tags; big deal. I wonder why the minor syntactic differences were so important though. Is it that hard to close a tag? And why no empty tags, they're certainly more concise? These are probably rhetorical questions. Sure HTML is superb; you still have to specify the time of your upcoming webinar as plain text so the users from other side of the world would have to look up what the WTF timezone is, but I'm sure there's a tiny half-megabyte JS library with a clever regex to fix this. XML is the only sane format to deal with marked up texts written in natural languages, and this is precisely because it is extensible, so you can describe the structure in terms that make sense to the subject matter and still be able to process it with standard tools. It's also a perfect format for parsing results, because XML is essentially a frozen syntax tree. HTML is just a single fixed language; it's widespread and popular but not because it's technically superior (same as JS and CSS).

rspeer 10y ago
You really want me to say more? You seem to have missed the point of my reply. You said "all modern publishing uses XML", and in doing so, you were overlooking the biggest counterexample to XML, and the biggest thing in modern publishing, which is HTML 5. HTML is a huge, huge example of modern publishing. It tried XML, when HTML 4 came along with XHTML. XML was basically designed around making XHTML work. And then HTML stopped using XML in HTML5. It took a revolt of all the implementers of HTML, but people got behind it because everyone could tell that XML wasn't helping. So now you've got a syntax that was designed for marked-up documents, that people don't really want to use for marking up documents, and it's also trying to convey data structures despite that this involves horrible patches like "xml:space" that no other format needs. You were also hinting at APIs for communicating things like time zones and chess moves. Real APIs don't use marked-up natural language. I work in natural language processing, and to a first approximation, computers don't understand shit about natural language. When you need to communicate data, you use data structures. If you want to communicate extensible data structures with hints about their semantics, you've got some choices, like protobufs and JSON-LD. Or you can keep patching XML and trying to make it convey data structures despite that data structures aren't made of marked-up strings, but then people won't use your API. XML is also an unwieldy format for parse results. It's not a frozen syntax tree, it's a tree with tons of stuff bolted on to the side. The format that represents a syntax tree is S-expressions.

rspeer 10y ago

You really want me to say more? You seem to have missed the point of my reply. You said "all modern publishing uses XML", and in doing so, you were overlooking the biggest counterexample to XML, and the biggest thing in modern publishing, which is HTML 5. HTML is a huge, huge example of modern publishing. It tried XML, when HTML 4 came along with XHTML. XML was basically designed around making XHTML work. And then HTML stopped using XML in HTML5. It took a revolt of all the implementers of HTML, but people got behind it because everyone could tell that XML wasn't helping. So now you've got a syntax that was designed for marked-up documents, that people don't really want to use for marking up documents, and it's also trying to convey data structures despite that this involves horrible patches like "xml:space" that no other format needs. You were also hinting at APIs for communicating things like time zones and chess moves. Real APIs don't use marked-up natural language. I work in natural language processing, and to a first approximation, computers don't understand shit about natural language. When you need to communicate data, you use data structures. If you want to communicate extensible data structures with hints about their semantics, you've got some choices, like protobufs and JSON-LD. Or you can keep patching XML and trying to make it convey data structures despite that data structures aren't made of marked-up strings, but then people won't use your API. XML is also an unwieldy format for parse results. It's not a frozen syntax tree, it's a tree with tons of stuff bolted on to the side. The format that represents a syntax tree is S-expressions.