begin quoting Christian Seberino as of Sun, Feb 04, 2007 at 10:49:11PM -0800: > > 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. > 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 there is almost never no one obvious, right, universal solution to *any* problem. And trusting that smart people will always do the right thing is very nearly the height of folly. People are people, and thus they will routinely do stupid things; they will make mistakes; they will invent things that aren't as universally useful as they might think. Plus, when evaluating two schemes to determine which one is superior, it is essential to ask "for _what_?" early on in the process. > OTOH, it is possible XML is superior in some way that my common regular > brain can't see. Maybe we just can't understand the brilliance of XML & > the joke's on us? :) People who got started with computers with the web wrote a lot of HTML; they *like* the look of XML. It's familiar, thus comforting. There's also SGML to point at to say "look, smart people came up with this". So it is probably better to look for pragmatic and plebian reasons for the acceptance of XML, rather than postulating that there is some intrinsic "brilliance" that we're just not seeing. This is the "good enuf" idea. Plus, XML has an X in it. That's worth a LOT. -- Naming is half the battle of acceptance. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
