Re: xml:* attributes

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 10:27 PM, John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org> wrote:

> 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.
>

I think some of these things are OK because people have already got used to
the quirks from HTML.  James's statement could probably be refined to:

"If somebody who knows nothing about XML, but who is, as many developers
are, familiar with HTML reads the MicroXML spec, one wants their reaction
to be: this is a pretty reasonable way to do document markup."

Of course that doesn't cover all the quirks you mention, leaving in
particular the mandatory attribute quoting.

I think the argument is that xml:id rather than id and xml:lang rather than
lang would strike our mythical developer as a bit too far along in the
quirks department.  I can see that, argument, and more importantly, the ban
of colons is the smaller increment over the starting point, so I think it
gets a bost from that.

I think it would be a huge reclamation from complexity in the XMl stack if
rather than global attributes in locally scoped namespaces we could
enshrine a way to express cross-vocabulary concepts as abstract forms
interpreted through syntactical transforms.  That's why I'm especially
happy to read:

> Exactly what I was thinking.  I think a MicroAF would be a very, very good
> > thing.
>
> *sighs exhaustedly*
>
> Okay, I'll look into it.


I think you're one of the few who could get that just right.


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