::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[Andy Wardley]

On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 10:39:33AM +0000, Alaric Snell wrote:
> XML has too much stuff that isn't formally specified, requiring human 
> intervention in many things :-(

XML has too many things that are badly designed, borken, and just plain
ugly.

> Eg, there is no definition mapping from XML to native data types like there 
> is for CORBA and XDR and ASN.1 and Java serialisation and friends. So you 
> have to deal with it at the DOM level, otherwise you discard potentially 
> vital information.

I believe that part of the reason for XML Schema growing to be so fat, 
ugly and consequently near-useless, is that a significant number of people
on the committee were confused about the purpose.  Instead of constructing
a general mechanism for describing the topology of data spaces, they instead 
spent their time worrying about how they could easily map XML documents into 
strictly typed languages like Java.

> XML isn't that easily editable. The non-technical people where I work refuse 
> to touch it, no matter how we try! So they ask us to perform menial editing 
> tasks for them :-(

Yep, couldn't agree more.  I was telling someone the other day about how
I started writing the TT3 documentation using XML and regretted it almost 
instantly.  That was the final push over the "XML Blows Goats" cliff.

:-)

> They need XML Spy or something. But if we're to use editors for everything 
> and never touch the stuff 'directly', why bother what the bit format is?

True. 

> What I'm talking about is *semantic* editing as opposed to *syntactic* 
> editing. Editing an XML file in Notepad is syntactic editing. Editing it in 
> XML Spy is semantic editing. Likewise with PNG files, just substitute the 
> Gimp for XML Spy!

Yep, absolutely.  TexMacs tries to do something like this - giving you
an emacs like editor which understands the structural nature of LaTeX 
documents (article, book, etc) and does a bit of WYSI(nearly)WIG on the
way.  Doesn't really shine though.

A