On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 10:18:45AM +0100, FRIGN wrote: > On Fri, 21 Feb 2014 11:37:30 +0100 > Anselm R Garbe <garb...@gmail.com> wrote: > > The web wouldn't be so successful if everything was strictly XML > > based, more the opposite IMO. > > Why is that? Are you referring to the fact parsing HTML as XML requires > the developer to be more careful with his markup and that stricter > parsing would scare off beginners?
There has been a lot of discussion why strict XML parsers don't belong in a browser. There even are XHTML enthusiasts that are against it. > That'd be a fair point and I agree, but on the other hand, the rule > still prevails: You write once, but parse often. You only write a parser once. But you write some magnitude more markup that is going to be parsed by it. So optimizing the markup specification for authoring has a better net gain than to optimize the protocol just to get away with a simpler parser. > > Apart from this, XML parsing is *not* simple. And XML sucks [0]. > > Yes, it sucks! This is out of question. But nothing compared to SGML. > The XML-standard has around 26 pages, whereas SGML takes around 600. That's why HTML uses only a subset of SGML. That said, I don't want to defend HTML and the web as such, but it would be much worse with XML IMO. At least from my perspective. -- Eckehard Berns