[Openmcl-devel] ccl manual (was Re: trace on recursive functions)

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 15 Dec 2009, at 17:33, Waldek Hebisch wrote:

> I think you forget basic fact: XML is ugly _bacause_ it was designed
> to be a markup language.  Being a markup language language means
> that "ordinary text" goes unquated, but the extras are more heavy.

That's not true.  XML is ugly because it's poorly designed.  (D)TML is/ 
was a markup language which richer than XML (for instance it can use  
anything CL can read as a type for attribute values) yet has  
significantly less syntax (for instance there are no named closing  
tags, the euivalent of CDATA requires much less work & so on).  TML  
was far from perfect, but it was a lot nicer to use than XML.

Of course XML is "poorly designed" because it needed to be mostly- 
compatible with SGML, and SGML was poorly designed mostly, I think,  
because of the "S".  It's significant that one of the things SGML did  
was to support a vast amount of shorthand syntax to make it easier to  
type as the syntax was so clumsy. Unfortunately they also made it  
really hard to write an SGML parser.