On 25/02/2012 06:04, Darren New wrote:
> On 2/24/2012 1:10, Invisible wrote:
>> That said, it /does/ seem overly complicated for the simple problem it's
>> supposed to solve...
>
> What simple problem do you think it was supposed to solve?

The problem of marking up textual data.

A lot of people seem to think that if you just write some stuff in angle 
brackets, that's XML. But it' actually far more complicated than that.

(As an aside, those aren't angle brackets. They're inequality signs. :-P 
But I digress...)

For example, to say "this XML file actually contains XHTML", you're 
supposed to add something like 5 separate headers, each about 25 million 
miles long, to the top of the file. Why? Would one header not be sufficient?

Then there's all that stupidity with character entities. It should be 
possible to include character entities in /all/ XML documents, not just 
XHTML. But to this day, I have never discovered a way of doing this.

One of the nice ideas of XML is that you can use namespaces to include 
one sort of XML document inside enought - e.g., you could put an SVG 
file inside an XHTML file. But nooo, apparently you need a specialised 
DTD to do that. In fact, you need one DTD for XHTML + SVG, another, 
different DTD for XHTML + MathML, a third, different DTD for XHTML + 
MathML + SVG, and... ARE YOU PEOPLE INSANE?!

In short, most people just end up sticking stuff in angle brackets and 
calling that XML. /Actual/ XML is far too complicated.

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