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by tannhaeuser
3427 days ago
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I agree, and I'd also like to add that I find general discussions about s-expr vs markup (as well as JSON vs XML years ago) pointless. Markup is meant as a text format for content authors that can be parsed into a hierarchical structure, rather than as general-purpose data representation syntax, even though XML is being frequently (ab-)used for this purpose. The original use case for markup is that you can take a piece of plain text and then mark it up with tags, unlike s-expr and/or JSON which arise out of the syntax of a programming language and need eg. verbatim text to be written as string constants/with quotation characters. |
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Yes, that was the original use case, but in actual practice HTML has not been used that way for a long time. Nowadays HTML is de facto used as a programming language for the visual representation layer of a browser. No one actually uses HTML to mark up documents by hand any more, for two reasons: first, no one writes plain text documents to use as source material for markup. They write Word documents, or TeX documents, but plain text source is all but unheard of nowadays. And second, HTML syntax is too clumsy and places too many demands on the user. So when ordinary people want to produce HTML they use WYSIWYG editors. When geeks want to produce HTML (and remember I'm talking about documents here) they use markdown. The only time anyone writes HTML nowadays is when they want to make a browser do something fancy.