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RE: Xml is _not_ self describing

• To: 'Elliotte Rusty Harold' <elharo@m...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: Xml is _not_ self describing
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2002 08:38:19 -0600

As long as you pretty print or indent well, that is so, but 
also true for any braced language if you don't have to 
scroll.  Otherwise, PFE and brace matching work for the 
curly brackets and not the pointy ones.  But any tool 
that will select/match a nest is a good idea beyond 
eyeballing it because any recursing element will 
make you curse right along with it.  VRML is curly 
bracketed and terse, but man, scanning and editing 
without the editor is mondo painful.  Part of that 
is because of the actual content:  long lines of 
numbers separated sometimes by space, sometimes 
by commas and the author or tool gets to choose. 
In this kind of situation, XML is verbose and kinda 
ugly, but easier.

S-expressions are good.  They are unfortunately 
LISP and they got the same bum rap as SGML for 
their time.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@m...]

The 1-1 onto mapping is more obvious here than in the CSV case. 
However, I still think XML has practical benefits, even if the 
information content is the same. Simply put, XML makes it a lot 
easier for humans to match the right end-tag with the right 
start-tag, and to find out which one's missing where when there is a 
problem. This is not really an issue for machines, but it's very 
important for human-generated and edited content.

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