Re: XML-Data: advantages over DTD syntax? (and some wishes)
len bullard (cbullard@hiwaay.net)
Thu, 02 Oct 1997 23:00:44 -0500
Paul Prescod wrote:
>
> Bruce T. Smith wrote:
> > I think Len's reaction is a bit extreme. I may debug in ASCII with line
> > numbers, but I don't edit with ed or EDLIN. If I wanted to hack lots of
> > HTML or SGML or VRML with a text editor, I'd choose emacs or some other
> > editor that was aware of syntactic structures.
>
> Sure, but Emacs does not hide verbosity. The complaint with XML-DATA is
> primarily verbosity. All of the XML syntax buries the information. The
> more dense the information you are working with, the smaller you want
> your delimiters. XML tags are <LOOOOONG>, <VERBOSE> delimiters.
Right. This is precisely the comment made about SGML DTDs for
structured procedural scripting languages. They are "ugly" to
look at if one has been a C programmer, and really nasty to
type. Witness MID: worked like a charm. Really hard on the
typist until reusable framgments emerged. MIL-D-87289 is another
example.
In fact, many of the modular DTDs that used element name
hierarchies to simulate object-qualities had this problem.
Colonized namespaces probably will as well.
len