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List: xml-dev
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Many different syntaxes in XML - is that good language design?
From: Shaun McCance <shaunm () gnome ! org>
Date: 2022-03-07 14:04:58
Message-ID: 7ae99a3c5823176bd228f4adc60f600c2affb79a.camel () gnome ! org
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On Mon, 2022-03-07 at 12:14 +0000, Roger L Costello wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> There are many different syntaxes in XML:
>
> The comment syntax: <!-- ... -->
>
> The PI syntax: <? ... ?>
>
> The CDATA section syntax: <![CDATA[ ... ]>
>
> The DOCTYPE syntax: <!DOCTYPE ... >
>
> The entity syntaxes: & and   and  
>
> The namespace syntax: xmlns:foo="..." and <foo:bar>...</foo:bar>
>
> Attribute/value syntax: x="blah"
>
> The start-tag/end-tag syntax:
>
> <baz>
> <widget>...</widget>
> </baz>
>
> Phew! That is a lot of different syntaxes.
>
> Is that good language design to have so many different syntaxes?
>
> Dealing with lots of different syntaxes is hard. For example, I never
> remember the syntax for CDATA sections (in fact, I had to look it up
> just now).
>
> Isn't it better language design to have a small number of syntaxes?
Counter-point: one of my favorite features of XML compared to a lot of
other text formats is that it has very few characters that are actually
syntactically relevant. When I write in many "lightweight" formats, I'm
second-guessing whether some character I typed is going to trigger some
parser feature. When I'm writing text in XML, the only two characters I
have to worry about are < and &.
If I were designed XML from scratch today, there are things I'd do
differently, including that CDATA syntax. But one thing I wouldn't
change is the predictability of characters.
--
Shaun
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