[Eric van der Vlist]
> 
> You can say the same for the Relax NG compact syntax (or for 
> WikiML), but in all the cases, if the compact and XML 
> syntaxes are equivalent, the argument is rather pointless 
> since your always only a simple translation away from the other!
> 
> And you can use the compact syntax with tools which do not 
> support it as long as you pass it through a pre-processor.
> 

Yes, and I actually have no objection to a non-xml syntax that is easy
for people to read and write.  I just want to make sure it can really
support the things I do.  Perhaps it was too strong to say that
referring to the stylesheet itself would be hard to work out.

> I think that we are paying too much attention to the syntax. 
> That's probably normal since the syntax is what we actually 
> see but what's important is just below and I see no problem 
> to choose the syntax that we prefer as long as it's 
> equivalent to the XML one and as long as we have converters.
> 

It would be interesting to have a reverse converter - take someone's
existing xml format and convert to compact syntax in the hopes of making
it easier to read and understand.  

However, I am against syntaxes that need lots of parentheses or braces
because those become hard to read and debug.  I sometimes use an
indented format (a la Python) for my own hand-authored to-become-xml
documents  and that works beautifully.  I have a little Python parser
that throws Sax events.  It cannot handle everything, but it does enough
to be useful.

Cheers,

Tom P

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