Hmm. I found myself nodding along with what this has to say about syntax design and the responsibilities of well-abstracted markup languages/converters, but I w

Hmm. I found myself nodding along with what this has to say about syntax design and the responsibilities of well-abstracted markup languages/converters, but I was also a little surprised by some apparent contradictions. > Great markup format unambiguously interprets an input string as an abstract tree model of a document. It doesn’t ascribe semantics to particular tag names or attributes. > Yes! > Markup language which nails this perfectly is HTML. It directly expresses this tree structure. Various viewers for HTML can then render the document in a particular fashion. HTML’s syntax itself doesn’t really care about tag names and semantics: you can imagine authoring HTML documents using an alternative set of tag names. But it's a bit weird to uphold HTML when it seems to really be valuing the underlying syntax and not the big heckin' standard that details the valid elements, attributes, and their semantics. :) > Great markup language defines the semantics of converting text to a document tree This seems to conflict with the first one I quoted. Maybe I'm missing something? Maybe the author is using semantic in different ways, here? Markup languages tend to mix different kinds of elements, and it can make thinking and communicating in this space tricky! I started trying to untangle this knot recently in https://t-ravis.com/post/doc/what_color_is_your_markup/ https://t-ravis.com/post/doc/what_color_is_your_markup/. (I also found banning "semantic" from my writing helped me untangle by making it easier to notice when I was letting it do too much work. https://t-ravis.com/post/doc/semantic_the_8_letter_s-word/ https://t-ravis.com/post/doc/semantic_the_8_letter_s-word/)