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Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. If someone told me tags must appear in a specific sequence for their markup to work, I call the implementation fla
by 9dev 4y ago
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. If someone told me tags must appear in a specific sequence for their markup to work, I call the implementation flawed. That’s been the downfall of XML - doing way too much for it’s own good.
- crabbone 4y ago> Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. This is where you are wrong. If you are making a validator, if the format can do something, the validator should deal with that possibility. If validator is incomplete wrt' validated features, it cannot be used to guarantee the document validity, which is... well, it's most important function. It has nothing to do with your emotional attachments to tags and sequences.
- 9dev 4y agoI get where you're coming from, but I don't believe overloading a data exchange format with too many dimensions of meaning is sensible. In XML, you can use tags, sequences of tags, tag attributes, and children tags; there are a multitude of ways to express the same thing. Following your approach, we could also count the number of spaces tags are indented with as an additional dimension: It's entirely possible to write XML this way and infer meaning from it, it's just not specified right now. I doubt you'd follow along with that. Let's look at the concrete reality we're dealing with: XML usage has declined, JSON (maybe supported by JSON schema) is ubiquitous. I'd be inclined to say the pendulum has swung a little too far in terms of simplicity - but overall, it's very clear why XML failed, and too few dimensions of meaning is definitely none of the reasons.