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From: Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Nature of XML (ramblings)
Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2004 18:14:53 +0000 (UTC)
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Marius Amado Alves <amado.alves@netcabo.pt> wrote:
 
: As I said, just rambling, but sometimes I feel the need to discuss these
: higher concepts, to check if something has changed there with the
: continuing appearance of new 'technologies'. I guess no changes since
: last time I looked. Also, any XML appraisal touches a sensitive button
: in me. I used to be attracted to XML. Now I find it horrible. Just today
: I got this feeling independently. I was reading a PhD thesis by
: Parmentier, where he transforms from BibTeX format to XML for "ease of
: processing".

And not ease of reading.

: He shows an entry in the the two formats side by side. The
: contrast in readability is stunning: BiTeX very readable, XML completely
: unreadable. And (La)TeX is not usually particularly readable. Also, you
: could see right away that an automaton for parsing the BibTeX would be
: much simpler to right than for the XML, and I bet more simpler to do it
: e.g. in Ada that to write the XSLT for the XML (and assembling and all
: the required tools). XML is the major hoax of two millenia.

XML is certainly a very much misunderstood language.

(Is a parser for Ada easier than a parser for Oberon?
Should we be writing programs in Oberon for that reason?)
If you read bibliographies without the help of a computer providing
a view suitable for humans, you should at least switch to SGML
with SHORTTAG, and maybe OMITTAG. All this has been known when old
SGML was standardised, XML is in parts a manifest of advances in
editor construction -- users are supposed not to see it.