Re: What can I do to help?

[Tom Lord]

    > According to my overinflated ego, XML is just a complete pain to parse

s/overinflated ego/good taste/

s/parse/parse, read, edit, and process with small tools[*]/

And beyond parsing, there's the arbitrary structural restrictions it
makes.

I'm tempted to gripe about the weakness of its type system, but one
thing it has the s-expressions don't is structure sharing with
external resources.  My vague impression is that a lot of the
abstractions they've thought about in that area deserve to be
captured, expressed _as_ abstractions, and recast in (extended) s-exp
form to achieve the best of both worlds.  (But I haven't done that
work, so I can't rule out the possibility that their abstractions
aren't just wrong.)

They also have various type systems on top of XML, too -- where
lispers would generally have more general pattern matching systems;
that looks to me like an XML area ripe for simplicifcation and
generalization.

-t

[*] Yes, DOM, expat, libxml and lots of other standards and libraries
supported by Perl, Python, etc. help disguise/work-around this.