Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: documentation as info

[Florian Weimer]

Tupshin Harper <address@hidden> writes:

> Or use an editor that removes the need to interact with the
> verbosity. The lack of contraction features is one reason that XML has
> proliferated in a way that SGML never did. It makes it *much* easier
> to write an XML parser, and also makes the parsing much faster. A
> worthwhile tradeoff.

No, it's not.  Computers are quite good at parsing, and even SGML is
not that hard (even though it's a bit bloated).  The lack of optional
tags makes it either hard to write uniform parsers (because the XML
DTD does not adequately describe the document structure) or to write
the documents using typical *NIX tools (because all the structure has
to be made explicit using tags).

I've written down a few thoughts on this dichotomy, when I designed
the XML DTD for my web pages:

  <http://www.enyo.de/fw/notes/xml-dtd-design.html>