Re: [dev] Re: Why HTTP is so bad?

From: Sam Watkins <sam_AT_nipl.net>
Date: Fri, 24 May 2013 13:03:11 +1000

On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 06:44:13PM -0600, Anthony J. Bentley wrote:
> HTML started out as SGML, which is even less sane than XML.

It's a lot more sane than binary word / wordperfect documents and such.
What do you suggest is better than HTML? troff? TeX? docbook? markdown?
And what should replace HTTP? 9p? ftp? gopher?

I like XML/XHTML as a document markup language, but not for exchanging data
structures. For that, I reckon it's good to use TSV/CSV tables,
or sets of key: value structs delimited by blank lines, e.g. Debian lists.

There are all sorts of bogosities with HTTP and HTML, but it's possible
to write nice simple clean well-formed HTML, and send nice simple clean
HTTP requests, ignoring most of the suckful bits.
Received on Fri May 24 2013 - 05:03:11 CEST