Christian Seberino wrote:
On Sun, February 4, 2007 9:47 pm, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
No, the Lispers screwed it up by fighting Unicode tooth and nail.
"ALL UPPERCASE IS THE ONE TRUE WAY!"
Had they adopted Unicode quickly, they could have cut off XML at the root.
It appears obvious to all of us that S-expressions are superior to XML.
Really? Why? S-expressions have no standard for escaping special
characters. S-expressions have no standard for Unicode compliance or
encoding. There are a couple of others.
If so, I don't understand why the XML founders, with all their resumes,
Ivy league degrees and dot.com millions didn't have enough collective IQ
between them to invent a Unicodey Lispy dialect instead.
Because they didn't start out to make XML a generalized exchange
language. XML stands for eXtensible *Markup* Language. It does a nice
job for markup.
It does a crappy job for exchange. However, it has one primary
advantage that led to its being adopted:
It is a *standard*.
There are libraries to read XML. There are libraries to write XML. How
things are interpreted is standardized.
I can't tell you how many POS parsers I have written over the years to
read some vendor's POS proprietary format. Or how many stupid POS
proprietary formats I have had to reverse engineer.
XML makes both of those problems less of an issue. I don't have to
write an XML parser--I can suck the whole tree into memory using DOM for
most applications. I don't have to reverse engineer some obscure
packing, the XML can be examined with a text editor.
These two factors make XML worth shoving down the throats of
corporations. These two factors are, of course, the whole reason why
Microsoft is fighting the OpenOffice XML standard quite so vigorously.
-a
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