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Now that I have spent some time on the Water site, I have a clearer idea of what they are trying to do. It seems to me that this markup system is generally in the same category as Cold Fusion Markup Language (CFML) and Zope's DTML, and somewhat related to "languages" like php, JSP and ASP. You stick statements into markup constructions, and anything the interpreter does not care about ends up on the page as is. According to the Water site, the programming language they embed is a prototype-based, object-oriented language, apparently much like Python or Javascript - of course, they say it is better and perhaps it is (who could tell at this point). As a possible difference from CFML, etc., it seems that the interpreter can be aware of the contents of all the markup on the page, whereas with CF or DTML, for example, the interpreter only receives certain specially-marked-up pieces. With a good underlying language (and I am a big Python fan so I appreciate these prototype-based languages) and a decent markup system (I have no opinion if they have achieved that), then, this could actually be pretty good. Of course by allowing tags within tags they have ruled out any compatibility with HTML, XML, or SGML generally. Despite this the site mentions repeatedly that it is "compatible" with HTML (which it is not, although it seems that HTML is compatible with their parser) and barely mentions XML at all. I do not know to what extent this approach makes the parser harder to build. If you got rid of all the hard stuff (character encoding, character entities, external entities, DTD validation, etc) then an XML parser would be almost ridiculously simple, but tags within tags would make it harder. I have not spent the time on the site to know what Water does with respect to character encodings and similar hard matters. They would have you believe that their markup is good enough that it can do everything that XML can do, so why not use it instead of XML and be able to hook right into the programming language at the same time? But many of the things XML can do that other systems do not do easily are not so obvious - they show up on this list all the time, of course - the angle brackets are just the obvious part. Just any system of angle brackets cannot replace XML, and it remains to be seen if the Water angle brackets could). Cheers, Tom P
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