[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: X-Schema syntax
Mark Birbeck wrote: > > A reply to Paul Prescod's reply to me: > > > > [XML definitions of schema are better than DTD ones because they > > > allow you to use the same tools as the rest of the time.] > > For programmers. But I asked about usability, not programmability. XML > > instance syntax is certainly easier for programmers. > > You might have moved the goalposts here. Aren't programmers entitled to > usability? In programming languages and APIs: sure. In syntaxes? Not really. The human readers and writers of a syntax should be the first market for its usability. Otherwise s-expressions would be the only syntax we use for anything. > Also, I assumed that the students you referred to were > programmers. Anyway, the question still remains, why is it better to > learn two syntaxes (XML and DTD) than just one? This is one of my favorite paradoxes. I can't count how many speeches and tutorials I've seen that started along the lines of: "XML schemas are great because they don't require you to learn a new syntax" and then continued along the lines of: "Now let's spend an hour talking about the syntax." A syntax is built on top of XML and still be a unique syntax that must be learned. RDF has a very complex syntax despite the fact that it is "just XML." The real question, then, is "why learn a non-XML syntax instead of an XML one?" The answer is the same as for URIs, XSL match patterns, programming languages and mathematical notations. We invent new syntaxes because they can be easier to read and understand. Usually being compact and/or familiar is an important part of that. So for instance, thousands of people are familiar with URLs and file systems and can learn XPointers based on that knowledge. Similarly, many people are familiar with regular expression syntax and can thus learn content model syntax based on that knowledge. Although I am in favor of instance syntax in general I think that recasting regular expressions as nested elements is a big mistake from a usability point of view and a very small gain from an ease-of-parsing point of view. -- Paul Prescod - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco Perhaps the war in Kosovo would get more press if it were directed by George Lucas. xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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