> Thoughts on XML and POVRay...

Daren,

I don't mean to disagree with the bulk of your argument,
but I'll persue a couple of points here for the sake of
discussion.

>   I agree with computer scientists such as Don Knuth and Ian Joyner,
> who have written extensively on programming languages - one of their
> main points being that the scripts written in a well-designed language
> needs to be easy for humans to write and to read, even if it's ultimately
> destined for the machine.  

LaTeX comes to mind as being roughly a Knuth style solution to
same kind of problem as HTML.  If history had been different,
all our web pages could have been built out of LaTeX documents,
but they arn't.  I like LaTeX, and I use it for quite specialised
things - but in a lot of cases the language is a bit mysterious
and behaves in unexpected ways.  For most jobs, I think HTML is
better because of it's simplicity.  LaTeX is good for it's
"macro" abilities, but HTML will prevail, perhaps because it is
more easily parsed and emitted by programs.  WYSIWYG is seen
as more user friendly than text-based editing with markup tags.
(LaTeX is roughly speaking a markup language)

> Software today has so much power to parse
> very complex languages, with very complex data models, there's no
> reason to design languages to make life easy for the computer.

If it means making exchange of data efficient, unambiguous and
robust - there is a case for making it easier for the computer.

>    An language that is easy to parse, but hard to for humans 
> to deal with, puts many users at an inconvenience for a 
> long time.

XML is not being proposed as being a replacement for hand-edited
scenes.

> The weakness about XML that worries me is that XML is designed to
> describe structure and meanings and properties of parts of that structures,
> not process.   

That's true - I'd prefer to see a pure data description, rather than
scripting or algorithms in an XML format.  

> Final thought:  What if the same argument for marking up scene files as
> XML were to be applied to  C++?  Syntaxic elements of C++ source
> files could be made into XML tags - what would that look like?  Would
> anyone like that?   Scary...

Providing that the source editor provided a good level of abstraction
from the XML representation - this would be quite a good way to develop
C++ software.  The concern should not be about what the low level
data looks like - think about rich functionality and ways of layering
useful views on top of that.
 
> *shudder me too*

Admittedly, XML is a paradigm shift.  People are pretty familiar
with hand editing text files.  But it's not the only way to get
things done.

Nigel

--
Nigel Stewart (nig### [at] nigelscom)
Research Student, Software Developer
Y2K is the new millenium for the mathematically challenged.

Post a reply to this message