RE: LFM + LFSP = LFE?

["Neil W. Van Dyke" <address@hidden>]

Brent Fulgham <brent.fulgham@xpsystems.com> writes at 12:16 12-Jun-2003 -0700:
> On a similar topic, I've been shocked to see the proliferation of a
> weird group of XML-syntax-based languages.  It astounds me that anyone
> thinks these examples are a good idea:

       "Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance."
                      -- W3C REC-xml-20001006 sec. 1.1

If you really want to be mortified, look at what XML syntax does to
the human-readability of otherwise decent languages like XSchema and OWL.

Mixing and matching arbitrary namespaces presents some linguistic
problems, but, just as with the base syntax, I think Lisp people have
devised better solutions to the problems.

I don't really blame the XML standards people.  The base XML standards
were saddled with legacy SGML/HTML requirements, and many of the layered
standards have had incentive to express themselves in terms of XML.
(XPath and CSS are two standards that managed to escape the burden of
XML syntax, though I'm not sure either came up with the perfect
alternative.)  And I'm still layering my own work atop XML standards --
just secretly using the more palatable SXML syntax and tools by Oleg
Kiselyov and Kirill Lisovsky.

-- 
                                             http://www.neilvandyke.org/