Stephen Waterbury wrote:
it's interesting to note that the intent
Steve Holden imputed to it earlier is not explicitly among them:
Steve Holden wrote:
It seems to me the misunderstanding here is that XML was ever intended
to be generated directly by typing in a text editor. It was rather
intended (unless I'm mistaken) as a process-to-process data
interchange metalanguage that would be *human_readable*.
Not unless you interpret "XML shall support a wide variety of applications"
as "XML shall provide a process-to-process data interchange metalanguage".
It might have been a hidden agenda, but it certainly was not an
explicit design goal.
If merely thinking about the purpose of XML doesn't make it
clear where Steve got that idea, read up a little bit more in
the spec to the very first paragraph in the Introduction, and
click on the little M-in-a-circle next to the phrase "data objects".
I'll even quote it here for you, to save time:
"""What Do You Mean By "Data Object?"
Good question. The point is that an XML document is sometimes
a file, sometimes a record in a relational database, sometimes an
object delivered by an Object Request Broker, and sometimes a
stream of bytes arriving at a network socket.
These can all be described as "data objects".
"""
I would ask what part of that, or of the simple phrase
"data object", or even of the basic concept of a markup language,
doesn't cry out "data interchange metalanguage" to you?
-Peter
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