- From: Robin Berjon <robin@berjon.com>
- Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2012 14:27:11 +0100
- To: Noah Mendelsohn <nrm@arcanedomain.com>
- Cc: Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>, "www-tag@w3.org List" <www-tag@w3.org>
On Mar 9, 2012, at 05:18 , Noah Mendelsohn wrote: > Anne asked: > > Hasn't there been ample evidence that XML is pretty bad for human > > authoring? > > I've also authored a fair amount of XHTML by hand, and I don't find it much harder to do than valid HTML. Which is to say, I routinely make stupid mistakes in my first cuts of either, run whichever validator applies, rinse & repeat. Of course, the fact that user agents are tolerant is convenient when I'm hacking around with the unvalidated stuff, but I'm not convinced that authoring clean XHTML is much harder than authoring clean HTML. I think that we should steer clear of debating whether XML is good or not for human-crafted documents. The important point to capture is that XML is a natural fit to encode document-oriented structures, as exemplified by DocBook and DITA (which are often authored through tools, especially the latter AFAIK). To turn this around, we could equally well rathole over whether UPnP is actually a good example of XML usage or an example of something that should be avoided at all costs (SOAP and embedded devices don't necessarily mix all that well...). The important point in the context of this page is that it's widely used so obviously it works, regardless of any misgivings one may have. -- Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon Coming up soon: I'm teaching a W3C online course on Mobile Web Apps http://www.w3devcampus.com/writing-great-web-applications-for-mobile/
Received on Friday, 9 March 2012 13:27:45 UTC