[Eric van der Vlist]
You can say the same for the Relax NG compact syntax (or for
WikiML), but in all the cases, if the compact and XML
syntaxes are equivalent, the argument is rather pointless
since your always only a simple translation away from the other!
And you can use the compact syntax with tools which do not
support it as long as you pass it through a pre-processor.
Yes, and I actually have no objection to a non-xml syntax that is easy
for people to read and write. I just want to make sure it can really
support the things I do. Perhaps it was too strong to say that
referring to the stylesheet itself would be hard to work out.
I think that we are paying too much attention to the syntax.
That's probably normal since the syntax is what we actually
see but what's important is just below and I see no problem
to choose the syntax that we prefer as long as it's
equivalent to the XML one and as long as we have converters.
It would be interesting to have a reverse converter - take someone's
existing xml format and convert to compact syntax in the hopes of making
it easier to read and understand.
However, I am against syntaxes that need lots of parentheses or braces
because those become hard to read and debug. I sometimes use an
indented format (a la Python) for my own hand-authored to-become-xml
documents and that works beautifully. I have a little Python parser
that throws Sax events. It cannot handle everything, but it does enough
to be useful.
Cheers,
Tom P
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