• To: <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Why XML?
• From: Arjun Ray <aray@n...>
• Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 03:24:58 +0000
• In-reply-to: <00a501c31b53$fb397c70$4bc8a8c0@A...>
• References: <OF1AE715F3.D4D85349-ONCA256D28.0001D5B4@f...> <16068.17304.410851.697539@m...> <00a501c31b53$fb397c70$4bc8a8c0@A...>

"Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...> wrote:
| From: "David Megginson" <david@m...>

 [on orthogonality of features in language design]
 
|> It's clearly a principle rarely put into practice (
| 
| Its clearly a completely bogus principle!  In fact, for markup languages
| the reverse is true: having more forms makes data capture and modeling 
| easier because you can choose the form that requires the least work. 

True.

| E.g. (<![CDATA[ ]]> or  &amp; )

I've always wondered about this choice among baroque syntaxes.  Too bad
MSSCHAR wasn't suitably redefined for XML.

| and (element or attribute) 

A permathread.

| and (<x></x> or <x/>) 

I think losing EMPTY declared content in syntax was a mistake.

| and ( y="z" or y='z'). 

Here I'm almost positive XML goofed.  This could have been exploited
profitably to distinguish CDATA from tokenizable attribute values.  (It's
a loss only for playing PE games with strings in the DTD.)

| The other bogus principle is that there should only be one syntax for 
| everything.

Like pointy brackets? ;-)

• References:
  • Why XML?
    • From: Matthew.Bennett@f...
  • re: Why XML?
    • From: David Megginson <david@m...>
  • Re: Why XML?
    • From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...>

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