- From: James Clark <jjc@jclark.com>
- Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2012 12:45:39 +0700
- To: John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>
- Cc: micro xml <public-microxml@w3.org>
On Sat, Aug 18, 2012 at 11:27 AM, John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org> wrote: > Why angle brackets? Why not? You have got to choose something. One advantage of angle brackets is that they occur infrequently in normal English text. > Why does a slash mean one thing at the beginning of a tag and something > completely different at the end? Actually I think that syntax is quite intuitive. They "/" indicates the closing of the element. > Why are quotes required around attribute values in all cases? For simplicity and robustness, so that it is not required to remember in which cases it is required in. > Why are both single and double quotes allowed, with zero difference > in meaning? So that you don't need to use escaping in the case an attribute value contains only one of ' and ". > Why are both empty-tags and start-tags followed by end-tags allowed, Because it is useless and painful to repeat the element name for empty elements. > with zero difference in meaning? Why should there be a difference in meaning? That's a feature. > Why the funky escape sequences instead of \<, \>, etc.? The named character reference syntax is not the greatest. > 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? The comment syntax is probably the worst syntax (although we haven't voted it in yet). > 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. I don't see XML, HTML and SGML as equivalent here. I think our potential audience is very likely to be familiar with HTML. So I think it's OK provided the funkier aspects of our syntax are similar to HTML. James
Received on Saturday, 18 August 2012 05:46:53 UTC