- From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
- Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2012 17:31:02 +0100
- To: Daniel Sullivan <dsullivan@danal.com>, public-microxml@w3.org
Daniel Sullivan asked, in a post which I've only just seen, >could you make a comment on the relationship/differences/utility of FtanML vs. uxml? FtanML was a student project to design a simple markup language. The aim was to have the simplicity of the JSON model, but with the addition of mixed content; and to do the mixed content without the verbosity of XML. We decided that compatibility wasn't going to be a constraint. In the end I think it's a very pleasing integration of JSON and XML, and it has the nice feature that the data model is pretty much JSON (the mixed content ends up just being lexical sugar, represented beneath the surface by JSON arrays of elements and strings). It improves on JSON in some respects and it also improves on XML in many respects. The fact that it's not compatible with the rest of the XML eco-system gives it little chance of survival in the wild - except perhaps to people who like JSON but recognize its limitations. MicroXML I think has different objectives, most notably the aim to be a subset of XML and therefore to work within the XML ecosystem (XPath, XQuery, schema languages, etc). I worry that MicroXML isn't radical enough to make it worth adopting: it's relatively low pain, low gain, but the low gain doesn't justify the cost of adoption. FtanML by contrast is too radical: it's high gain, high pain. Michael Kay Saxonica
Received on Thursday, 30 August 2012 16:31:28 UTC