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> But in XML, if I look at it as a data exchange format, I am not sure if introducing more relaxed parsing rules would do any good. More options often lead to confusion and to more room for making mistakes, and the last thing you want is to get unexpected (maybe completely correct wrt the parsing/recovery rules, but unexpected to the data author nonetheless) results from the XML parser on the receiving side. But it's worth giving it a try, isn't it? Isn't that how HTML5 started (and most webby things). People tried microformats and found they were useful enough to be adapted for HTML5. What gets accepted flies, what doesn't work gets dropped and that seems to be the way the Web has grown. XML is different, in many developers' eyes (not just web developers): It has been designed by committee and dropped on the world from a great height (not that I and many others don't greatly appreciate and value that). Look at C, HTML, SMPT, etc and they were mainly the hard work and great design ideas of one or two people, owned by one. Then sometimes tried and tested for a few years in a melting pot of a small group of real developers before being published for wider use (but not necessarily standardised by ISO or the like till years later after endless cases of successful use - or just dropped if not successful). XML seems to be more about the compromised ideals of a concensus committee (or committees) with its that work and bits that don't, a bit like it's cousin the WS stack. The usual web developer thing to do with a set of technologies like this seems to be to open them up to the developer community and let people hack them around and make them into what they like to use then offer them back as some kind of submission and maybe standardise the end result (but by then they lose interest - they'd use CSS even if it wasn't a standard I supsect). That might be the way XMl would have to go to get wider web adoption - painful (perhaps prohibitively so) as that might be to XML-heads. Of course this is all anecdotal and so many on this list know the real facts so I'll shut up :-) ---- Stephen D Green On 10 December 2010 10:24, <vojtech.toman@e...> wrote: >> > May I ask if the success of XML is attributed to its verbosity? >> > >> > Introducing terse but complex syntax like skipping/stripping end tags sound >> > like 're-engineering' a traffic junction to have no lights and assuming >> > everyone understands when to stop/move. >> > You save on traffic lights, but your traffic slows down. We can always point >> > people to a detailed manual instructing how to operate, but yeah, how many >> > humans do that diligently. >> >> But hasn't HTML succeeded even more so than XML? And hasn't that partly >> been down to it making assumptions about what 'everyone understands'? >> So maybe XML would be even more successful - and, more on topic, get more >> take-up on the Web - if it became more like HTML which by and large would >> mean relaxing a lot of things. > > In the web browser, it is great that the HTML parser can recover from the mistakes in the markup and still show me a more or less faithful rendition of the page. That's the obvious value of the relaxed parsing rules. The web page contains a lot of visual redundancy and I, as a human observer, typically don't care if two paragraphs are rendered as one, or if the table looks a little different in browser X. I can still make sense of it. > > But in XML, if I look at it as a data exchange format, I am not sure if introducing more relaxed parsing rules would do any good. More options often lead to confusion and to more room for making mistakes, and the last thing you want is to get unexpected (maybe completely correct wrt the parsing/recovery rules, but unexpected to the data author nonetheless) results from the XML parser on the receiving side. > > (Note: this wasn't about verbosity; that is a whole different subject.) > > Vojtech > > -- > Vojtech Toman > Consultant Software Engineer > EMC | Information Intelligence Group > vojtech.toman@e... > http://developer.emc.com/xmltech > > _______________________________________________________________________ > > XML-DEV is a publicly archived, unmoderated list hosted by OASIS > to support XML implementation and development. To minimize > spam in the archives, you must subscribe before posting. > > [Un]Subscribe/change address: http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/ > Or unsubscribe: xml-dev-unsubscribe@l... > subscribe: xml-dev-subscribe@l... > List archive: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ > List Guidelines: http://www.oasis-open.org/maillists/guidelines.php > >
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