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On Sun, 05 Dec 2010 17:15:14 -0800, Bill Lindsey <bill@b...> wrote:
> If I were to get interested in an effort to update XML, it would have
> to be because I saw a chance to address the what I think is it's
> biggest problem:
>
> It's ugly.
>
> And that ugliness is largely a result of it's unnecessary verbosity.
>
> Engineers (I'm one) tend to value concision in expression and XML's
> requirement for named end tags usually just adds noise.
Hrumph. An engineer should perhaps ask "what problem is this solving?"
before passing judgment based on ugliness.
One problem that explicit end-tags address is how to keep track of
scoping in very large documents. The languages which have brackets (like
C-style { }) run up against a wall with large documents: making a virtue
out of a necessity, the bracketing languages provide facilities for
keeping individual file sizes down: macros, functions, classes, etc. A
deeply nested C syntax file of several meg in size might be considered
unmaintainable and bad form, but a deeply nested XML file of several
megabytes is not so rare and presents no particular difficulty for
editing and processing.
In order to call this "unnecessary", you first have to say either that
the use case is not required, or show that in fact XML's features didn't
help in this use case.
And, in an case, there is an alternative syntax available for end-tags
(from SGML natch), which is </>.
Cheers
Rick Jelliffe
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