- From: John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>
- Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2012 00:27:37 -0400
- To: James Clark <jjc@jclark.com>
- Cc: micro xml <public-microxml@w3.org>
James Clark scripsit:
> a) I want to minimize the things in MicroXML that make sense only if
> you know the historical context of MicroXML. If somebody who knows
> nothing about XML reads the MicroXML spec, I want their reaction to
> be: this is a pretty reasonable way to do document markup.
Boy howdy, I wouldn't know where to start with that one.
Why angle brackets?
Why does a slash mean one thing at the beginning of a tag and something
completely different at the end?
Why are quotes required around attribute values in all cases?
Why are both single and double quotes allowed, with zero difference
in meaning?
Why are both empty-tags and start-tags followed by end-tags allowed,
with zero difference in meaning?
Why the funky escape sequences instead of \<, \>, etc.?
Why the funky comment start and end markers instead of /* and */, or
// and newline, or # and newline, or whatever? Why is -- not allowed
in comments?
For all of these questions, the only answer is "For backward compatibility
with XML, HTML, or SGML." And they cover just about every piece of
markup in the language.
--
Take two turkeys, one goose, four John Cowan
cabbages, but no duck, and mix them http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
together. After one taste, you'll duck cowan@ccil.org
soup the rest of your life.
--Groucho
Received on Saturday, 18 August 2012 04:28:10 UTC