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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: MinML: an experimental, more concise meta-syntax forXML an
 Bryan, Michael and all, hello. On 4 Jan 2023, at 10:20, Michael Kay wrote: Thanks for sharing. This kind of project is great fun: I did something similar with a group of students under the name FtanML -I fully agree it's great fun, and my own contribution to the playpit is <https://nxg.me.uk/dist/lx/>, which is a syntax intended to look like the 'sexp' syntax that various Lisps use, which is parseable into a SAX stream (so the consumer of that stream doesn't have to know that it didn't originate in pointy brackets). When I was thinking about that, I was concerned with very markup-heavy 'texts' (such as XSLT), as opposed to the more traditional use-case (which I think MinML is aimed at?) where there is more text than markup. Also, I just find the homogeneity of sexps really pretty! and it's not difficult to do a lot better than XML on many measures (but beware the end tag problem: counting brackets in ">>>>>>>>>" gets tedious).Indeed (though the ')))))' problem is a non-problem if you have anything resembling a lisp head on you, or if you're using a programmer's editor; I agree this isn't everyone). The sad fact though is that standards like ASCII, the Qwerty keyboard, and XML survive for centuries because the cost of change is higher than the benefit. They might be displaced in particular areas, but there needs to be a very strong incentive to change in an area where the cost of breaking compatibility is not too high. That's a high hurdle to get over.I think this is the big/deep/core point. I'd guess that lots of people have favourite ways that the XML syntax is Annoying, but it's a very 'engineer's' solution, which isn't pretty, but which is stable because it's being pulled in so many different directions at once. I suspect large chunks of the various constraints would have to change, before the solution space would change enough to make a radically different syntax something other than a minority taste. Best wishes, Norman -- Norman Gray : https://nxg.me.uk SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK 
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