begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 12:25:35PM -0700:
[snip]
> Yes, sorry, that wasn't explicit. Named closing tags seem to be *the*
> feature that made XML take off. Even with smart editors, for some
> reason people never took to s-expressions but did take to XML. The Lisp
> folks whine about this continuously.
I attributed the rise of XML as due to two factors:
(1) it has "X" in the name, that's seXy, and cool.
(2) it's very much like HTML, and we've had a generation who grew
up on HTML as a "programming language" (I've seen this on more
than one resume); it's what they know, it's what they're used
to looking at -- it's a natural progression.
> I really think this is the key. The named closing tags guarantee a
> certain amount of error localization.
You'd think that, and yet I find with XML it's pretty much start from
the top time and try to identify the error through sheer effort. I
don't like working like that.
[snip]
> Or, a buggy interchange generator. This is the bigger problem. Quite
> often one of the lesser used code paths in the generator acquires a bug.
> Without named closing tags, this bug can slide past a lot of parsers
> as it occurs infrequently. Even then, it can be really hard to track
> down since it can occur a long way from where it was indicated.
I've always seen XML-generating software do so in such a way that
closing tags *don't* get out of order. There may be bugs (incorrect
nesting), but not out-of-order tags.
Then again, looking at generated HTML, who knows? Maybe I have
been lucky in that regard. Mismatched tags are almost never a
problem (except when trying to visually find and correct 'em),
while hidden parser dependencies are a killer.
[snip]
> However, XML tends to be more extensible than *anything* else. It
> requires quite a bit of work to create an older, readable XML document
> that cannot be read by newer parsers. Backward compatibility requires a
> bit of thought but normally not *too* much.
I tend to see extensible XML that's opaque and impossible to read and
harder to navigate, and almost readable XML that's sensitive to any sort
of extensions.
[snip]
> I, however, haven't seen the spiraling XML complexity. I use XML for
> what it should be used as--an interchange format. I don't try to make
> it into a database; I don't try to give it semantic meaning; I don't try
> to index it using completely unrelated tools.
That probably explains why you don't hate XML yet. :)
> Absolutely. XML is not magic. In fact, all of the problems it "solves"
> have been solved before. The difference is that XML allows people to
> apply pressure to the idiots in a simple way--"Does it talk XML? No?
> Come back when it does."
When told something "talks XML", I ask "why?". Often, it's "because we
can" or "it makes us seem modern" or even "we had to because $idiot told
us we had to".
Three-item configuration files do NOT need to be in XML.
I'm sure there's an appropriate place for XML, but I see it there so
rarely that I'm soured on the whole idea.
-Stewart
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