On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 10:18:45AM +0100, FRIGN wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Feb 2014 11:37:30 +0100
> Anselm R Garbe <garbeam_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> > The web wouldn't be so successful if everything was strictly XML
> > based, more the opposite IMO.
>
> Why is that? Are you referring to the fact parsing HTML as XML requires
> the developer to be more careful with his markup and that stricter
> parsing would scare off beginners?
There has been a lot of discussion why strict XML parsers don't belong
in a browser. There even are XHTML enthusiasts that are against it.
> That'd be a fair point and I agree, but on the other hand, the rule
> still prevails: You write once, but parse often.
You only write a parser once. But you write some magnitude more markup
that is going to be parsed by it. So optimizing the markup specification
for authoring has a better net gain than to optimize the protocol just to
get away with a simpler parser.
> > Apart from this, XML parsing is *not* simple. And XML sucks [0].
>
> Yes, it sucks! This is out of question. But nothing compared to SGML.
> The XML-standard has around 26 pages, whereas SGML takes around 600.
That's why HTML uses only a subset of SGML.
That said, I don't want to defend HTML and the web as such, but it would
be much worse with XML IMO. At least from my perspective.
--
Eckehard Berns
Received on Fri Feb 21 2014 - 13:34:41 CET