On 15 October 2010 21:50, Kenneth McDonald <[email protected] > wrote:
> Well, just to make it concrete, I am not a troll. I've been doing dev for > 20+ years, have lots of > experience with large projects, etc. etc. If I have to drop names, I was > associated with one of > the two main sites of the Human Genome Project. > > I still don't get the complacency at the XML swamp. How is > <genericTagName>false</genericTagName> > > possibly better than > > <genericTagName>false</> > > which would in turn be better than: > > genericTagName = "false" > > XML is a swamp of undertulized, overused redundancy. Period. > > In response to the person who'd interrogated 2K+ people to see if they > thought > XML was overrdone; Wow, that's really impressive! Where did you find the > time > to ask all those people and still get your your job done? Whereas, if I ask > the five > people who I know well, and who have to use these tools, the answer is, > "what > a bunch of garbage". They HATE XML. > > Still not convinced? What about the simple fact of that that languages > before, and the > languages _since_ have not been written in a dialect of XML. If XML were > such a great > solution, surely it would have cleared here by now. > > But of course it hasn't. The reasons is because it's a CRAPPY SOLUTION. > Period. No Line breaks. > Unless one is writing for ultimate display in the web, XML SUCKS > > In all the best to have all the people who have responded to this, > I don't see how you can continue maintain your position, > Yours, > Ken I don't think you're going to convince many people with a rant like that. Not one person in this thread has taken the position that XML is great. I don't think anybody, even the people who did design it, would design XML the same way now. There are far stronger criticisms of it than named end tags though. It is like it is for a bunch of reasons that are to do with its hereditary burden carried from SGML, the people involved in the original specification and (sadly) the process of managing that amongst other reasons. If you're interested the history and design decisions can be read up at the w3c. However even acknowledging that there are valid and well thought out criticisms of XML design beyond the ones you've brought up in this thread, it hasn't become so widely used (and misused) by some accident. It is very popular for exactly the reason that it was the best choice for maven - because it is very simple to understand and to build tools for. I think really you're lucky POMs are in XML, because if they were in something like python you'd have had all of the same difficulties without the target to vent at. And with far less help, since maven would not be nearly as popular if read a POM required people to learn a programming language as well as the semantics for maven. I hope you get over the XML thing and find maven useful to you - best way to do that is to follow conventions and use tools. Regards Brian
