Re: [dev] XML vs HTML (was: Article about suckless on root.cz)

From: Christoph Lohmann <20h_AT_r-36.net>
Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2014 17:56:58 +0100

Greetings.

On Fri, 21 Feb 2014 17:56:58 +0100 FRIGN <dev_AT_frign.de> wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Feb 2014 16:18:33 +0100
> Szabolcs Nagy <nsz_AT_port70.net> wrote:
>
> > xml is not just markup but
> >
> > http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#charencoding
> > (mandatory utf-8 and utf-16 support with bom)
>
> What's wrong with UTF-8?

BOM is wrong.

> > it's much better to use a restricted specific language
> > with simple well defined semantics than generic things
> > like sgml and xml (with arbitrary long tag and attribute
> > names), once you do this the origin (sgml, xml,..) does
> > not matter
>
> At the cost modularity. Still, I'd welcome a solution like this!

All this discussion sucks. The real question is how to make HTML sim‐
pler. With only some rendering engines and all of them under control of
Open Source it should be possible to push a simpler »description lan‐
guage« for what to display on a website. Just look at the reduced code
Google is sending out and it works in nearly every browser engine. Re‐
duce HTML to that substandard, make it easier to parse and standardize
this. When old documents fail to parse, let their authors change them.

In the evolution of HTML it grew to a state where humans shouldn’t write
this by hand. In such a state, when only computers read what’s produced
by computers, binary encodings are allowed. Make HTML easily parseable
with byte separators, length descriptors and easy definable parts. If
everything is just a DOM object, make the DOM easily parseable instead
of having many intermediate dependencies like CSS or Javascript. I don’t
think big browser vendors would choose against such an option, if it’s
faster, easy to implement and allows the same features as the current
state. Of course someone is needed to make a proposal and create the
reference implementation.


Sincerely,

Christoph Lohmann
Received on Fri Feb 21 2014 - 17:56:58 CET

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