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Re: Lx: compact syntax for XML

• To: Norman Gray <norman@a...>
• Subject: Re: Lx: compact syntax for XML
• From: Rick Marshall <rjm@z...>
• Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 09:17:33 +1000
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <2DACFB92-9188-11D8-8A0C-003065BB956E@a...>
• Organization: Zenucom Pty Limited
• References: <2DACFB92-9188-11D8-8A0C-003065BB956E@a...>
• Reply-to: rjm@z...

hi norman

i understand all that you've said, and i'd have to say that the
readability of angle brackets isn't great. particularly with long
tagnames, names spaces, etc.

but, and this remains the point of everyone who's ever fought the nested
bracket issue, and lisp people would know this better than anyone... how
do you know the terminator is terminating what you want it to terminate.
(there's a song in there somewhere ;) )

ugly unreadable angle brackets fix that pretty well.

rick

On Mon, 2004-04-19 at 08:31, Norman Gray wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> On Sunday, April 18, 2004, at 10:19 PM, Rick Marshall wrote:
> 
> > this may sound crazy, but every proposal i've seen so far to make xml
> > quicker/faster seems to rely on getting rid of the end tag.
> 
> Ah, but I don't want to make XML `quicker/faster' for the machines (the 
> other current thread here recognises that this is largely pointless in 
> the vast majority of cases).
> 
> I just want to make XML (specifically XSLT and occasional RDF) easier 
> to read and write, and a bit easier for my editor to grok helpfully 
> (and yes, I do use psgml).
> 
> Thomas Passin's python-like syntax is nice, too, and similarly 
> isomorphic to standard XML.  The only difference is that Thomas's 
> syntax doesn't leap out of the page at me, whereas the lispish syntax 
> does.  Thomas clearly does a lot more Python than I do, so maybe this 
> is just a matter of habits and training, but it's this sort of `visual 
> obviousness' that I'm after, that Lx has, and XML's angle brackets 
> don't.
> 
> It's not that I've got a downer on angle brackets -- I've been working 
> with *ML long enough for that -- just that the decision to have XSL 
> written in XML instance syntax means that XSL is a lot less legible, 
> not to say downright ugly, than it has to be.
> 
> All the best,
> 
> Norman
> 

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