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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Validation vs performance - was Re: Fast text o
 I've nothing against RELAX NG except marketability and that is the same for anything new and different. I don't see evidence for 'unstoppable momentum'. I see programmers getting a a sharp knife where before they had to use an axe. It is a good choice of tools for those smart enough to know how to choose. Like anything else sold by political, religious or emotional persuasion, it's a bad idea to take a knife to an axe fight. :-) 1. Yes, readability and verbosity are related. So is comprehension. But as you note, it is the complexity of the application or as I have noted, the opaqueness of the text that one is measuring, not only the syntax. Even in SGML where end-tag omission was allowed, I found that I preferred fully-end tagged text combined with pretty print formatting. So toss in not only syntax but layout. In the simpler C-like (say curlies) syntaxes, I found I had to have a brace-sensitive editor regardless. With XML, I can open it in IE and instantly find out if it is well-formed. With XML I can write a DTD, or Schema, or RELAX and find out a lot more. Cheap ubiquitous tools are persuasive if not always sharp. With every other format, I need yetMoreToolsForTheSameJobs. 2. What value for a measure would be powerful enough to introduce a new syntax for an old information set? One would have to compare an unnoticeable cognitive load to a noticeable change in format. 3. Programmers aren't the only people who have to read it. We can learn to read anything we have to. We can handle alternatives if we have to. We need to know if we have to because optimizing for the programmer in all cases is not necessarily a good selector for optimizations, and the gains may not be worth the cost. Again, we need to see some 10 for one improvements to consider it. And again, is a binary characterization WG a mandate to overhaul other parts of the system 'while we're at it'. Scope. Mission creep. All the usual paranoias. len From: Henrik Martensson [mailto:henrik.martensson@b...] Readability has a lot to do with verbosity, and the RELAX NG compact syntax is certainly a lot less verbose than the XML syntax. Another point in favor of the compact syntax is the use of regex-like constructs. As a programmer, this is something I am already comfortable with. One could adapt a readability formula, such as Flesch-Kincaid or SMOG to work with schema syntax. (Well, for the purposes of this discussion, anyway.) If one did, one would find that the compact syntax is considerably easier to read, especially for more complex expressions. Whether one perceives this difference in readability is another matter. I certainly do. On the other hand, if one is good enough at interpreting the XML syntax, the extra cognitive load would not be noticeable. It would probably still be _measurable_ though. Does anyone know if there has been any work done on the readability of programming languages? I suspect it would be quite interesting reading. 
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