begin quoting Christian Seberino as of Sun, Feb 04, 2007 at 12:38:42PM -0800: > XML is not very human readable. Neither is Lisp code when it is difficult > to match closing parens.
And yet, one of the advantages used to sell everyone on XML is that it's human-readable. And it's not too bad, if done properly, but in general, it's not done "properly" very often. > One advantage of XML over Lisp S expressions is that you know what element > closing tags like </foo> refer to. Sometimes. I recently ended up looking at XML that had a <section> tag, and <section> tags could contain other sections. Trying to match up the </section> with the appropriate opening-tag *sucked* -- same problem as trying to match up braces, parents, or brackets, only more difficult. > People tell me they handle Lisp parens hell by proper indentation. When > properly indented, "you don't even see the parens!". Also by tools that can match parens. Most XML editors don't show you the XML anymore; they transform it into a hierarchal structure, which is fine, sometimes, but *sucks* if that's not exactly the view that you need. [snip] > It seems that we either have to mandate proper indentation in XML to avoid > need for pointy brackets or accept the difficult readability of pointy > bracket XML. ...or go back to S-Expressions. > So which is worse? Pythonic whitespace or XML unreadability? Pythonic whitespace. -- Well, he asked. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
