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AW: AW: AW: AW: commenting and documenting XSLT (small survey)

2004-07-09 02:43:33
hi Wendell,
first, thanks for your input.

Von: Wendell Piez [mailto:wapiez(_at_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com]

At 08:01 AM 7/8/2004, you wrote:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
a list
======
* item 1
* item 2

with some *emphasized* or ``tt`` text
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It is readable, and writable, but:

Is it learnable? (how do I know that * delimits emphasis, 
except when it 
doesn't? what if I want bold not italics? what if I do 
~this~, what comes out?)

What happens when it contains glitches?


The problems you describe is exactly the reason why i did not develop another 
format myself.
ReST is a format which I only chose. It seems to be one of the better wiki like 
ML languages. It is currently in development but seems to be quite usable 
already. From what I know about it it has some really good developers which 
have much more experience doing such a thing that i ever might have. (For more 
details see the docutils website.)

Learnable? Well, it certainly is another language to learn and that's also a 
complaint I got from an xsldoc user. On the other hand it is quite a simple 
format (if you stick to the basics which are probably only used for the text in 
XML comments anyway) but *can* do complex things if you need them.


How does an author know whether it is properly formed, 
without concepts 
analogous to XML "well-formedness" and "valid", and tools to 
implement 
their specifications? Is there any way to know the 
correctness of the input 
besides running the process and inspecting the output? If so, 
what is it 

the process that generates XHTML out of the txt format does give quite good 
error messages, so it does validate its format. But you are right, that this 
still is an area which I have not really looked into.



and how is it specified? If not, who owns, controls, and 
maintains the 
ur-process that controls everything?

Also, I question how easy it is to process into XHTML 
afterwards. It may be 
easy to do the first 80% but I submit that the last 20% -- 
and all the 
subsequent desiderata like "how do I make a list item with 
more than one 
line in it?" -- will probably drive you crazy.

that is not the scope of my app as i only use the docutils format and their 
developers have sorted out the main things already. I am just a user of the 
format and so have to hope that the docutils project does what they say it 
should (which i think they do btw).



Part of what makes XML so powerful -- for those that have 
eyes to see -- is 
that it handles these questions in such a robust way. No, XML 
syntax is not 
perfect. But the syntax is just the beginning of a markup 
application, not 
the end. XML has not only got a syntax, it has a very sophisticated 
processing model as well, which can be used to address 
questions such as 
those I've asked above. Part of XML's sophistication is 
evident in how 
simple it appears to be, and basically is, while it can 
likewise scale in 
complexity to address very difficult, and various, problems.

But that simplicity took years -- decades -- of experimenting 
with markup 
languages before anything solidified (it happened to be SGML) 
to the point 
that it could be reinvented as "XML".

I like WikiML and the whole notion of reduced, learnable, 
plain-text markup 
conventions, and I'll take it as a sign of real progress when 
one emerges 
with a design compelling enough, and a processing model robust enough 
(it'll have to go beyond "check correctness by eyeballing 
output"), to 
unseat the currently-dominant paradigm. Anything not as 
dead-simple as 
<tag>this</tag> is going to be a pain to learn, teach, maintain.

And it would be ironic if a utility you developed to help you 
maintain 
stylesheets became a maintenance headache of its own.


I am convinced that XML is a great format for various reasons (may it only that 
it is a standard *a lot* of people agreed on and use). Certainly there will be 
an even better format in the future, but not the near one...
XML is just not very suitable for the area I need an ML language for. a wiki 
style ML is much better for that as it is much more readable and writable and 
IMHO is learnable with neglectable effort.




You asked for opinions ... I agree with David and DaveP on this one.

Cheers,
Wendell


thanks
chris


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