Re: Parse error attempting to resize font (1.4.12/Windows)

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

address@hidden writes:
> 
> One thing I'm interested in - has anyone thought of using XML as a
> neutral definition language in front of LilyPond?  Potentially more
> verbose, but there are potential benefits as well.  (Probably will start
> this as a separate thread if I get any takers on this question.)
> 

I didn't have time to write a reply myself, but this slashdot comment
excellently summarizes why I think that XML for lilypond is a complete
waste of time:

 XML-based. (Score:5, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15, @08:55PM (#3527007) XML is
just a method of storing structured data as a rooted tree. Nothing
more. Nothing less.

It's become popular not becuase the technology itself is particularly
revolutionary-- the technology is simple. It's become popular, rather,
becuase of a number of very versatile, useful, well-done parser
libraries that (for example) let you save and retrieve your structured
data to and from XML without much fuss or work at all. As opposed to
mucking about with file pointers and binary data and such yourself,
and probably misusing a free() call somewhere and segfaulting. (There
is also the associated neat ease-of-parsing technologies, like schema
and XSL, but i won't get into that.) One such parser library was
written by microsoft, and is part of ".NET". This is why microsoft is
pushing XML right now; it's a development best practice. Or something
of the sort. Not because they are moving toward XML as an "open
standard".

(The fact it has a sexy acronym, and the fact that nebulous
connections exist in people's minds between anything XML (no matter
how useless) and the very useful technologies like SOAP and XSL that
have sprung from XML, doesn't hurt.)

XML does not support interoperability in any way unless everyone
agrees on common XML grammars for a specific task.

Unless Microsoft releases the XML schema for their new-office XML
format, then the new MSWord format will be every bit as much unusable
gibberish as the old MSWord format (except the new gibberish will
contain a lot of > and < symbols, and begin with a standard tag
identifying it as an XML document). Microsoft seems every bit as
xenophobic as they'd ever been, and have given no indication they will
release such a schema for any reason unless they are forced to as part
of a court judgement terminating the current antitrust case with the
states. And probably not even then, unless the court order is carried
out by armed national guard members storming the Redmond compound.


Han-Wen Nienhuys   |   address@hidden    | http://www.cs.uu.nl/~hanwen/