* Daniel Pittman <dan...@rimspace.net> [2007-09-28 02:40]: > we were talking about the abomination of XML that was designed > by taking SGML, pulling anything designed to make it human or > author friendly out, then claiming that this was all done for > the best because we can much better afford to spend human brain > "cycles" than a few CPU cycles dealing with the added > complexity.
Err, was there ever a complete implementation of SGML? No? For a reason. Not that I would have minded *some* of the minimisation shortcuts of SGML, mind. Though, being able to verify well-formedness of a document without having a schema is a huge win, because it drastically lowers the barrier to getting ad-hoc work done. That alone is in conflict with many syntactic shortcuts. Also if you insist on using all shortcuts available in full SGML you can easily produce a cryptic document that a human has trouble reading too. I really wish they had kept at least the `</>` shortcut, though. Plus a few others that don't conflict with schemaless well- formedness checking, like whatever it was that closes the last open tag and opens a new one with the same name, which is nice for writing sequences of list items or paragraphs or such. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
