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by tannhaeuser
2030 days ago
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> Glad you refer to SGML, I thought XHTML was amazing at the time too, then HTML5 broke compatibility with everything. HTML5 was explicitly designed for backward-compat with the large body of HTML4 (and earlier) content out there. And HTML5 can still be parsed using SGML, which as a superset of XML is every bit as powerful as XML, yet also has tag inference, attribute shortforms, and other minimization features dropped from the XML subset of SGML that are necessary for HTML, though. So there's no reason to be bitter about XML's demise on the web; I've even written a tutorial for XML workflows involving HTML integration or output using SGML [1]. [1]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/sgml-html-tutorial.html > XML and attendant standards had also blossomed into fractal complexity. Fully agree. It appears that once XML was out there, people wanted to apply it to each and everything. When markup is really only useful for semistructured text. In that department, you actually might find SGML much more useful, since not only can it deal with HTML, it can also parse markdown or other custom syntax (even JSON and s-exprs!), has built-in styling and transformation facilities capturing core CSS, and much more powerful templating and transclusion/fragment reuse mechanisms for actual text authoring and processing. |
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There was a moment in the web's history where we were trying to figure out how to make XML, HTML, RSS, and 'microformats' all play well together. Next to that were a million authors of WordPress themes who thought 'semantics' was academic rubbish, and just wanted to make the web into another word processor. We got OWL, RDF triples, and no-one paid attention, and just carried on farming complexity.
The cries for simplification are more the result of the tooling, build chains, etc., in my mind than the core tech of HTML, CSS, JS. I'm just concerned that we redouble the complexity by inventing new abstractions to wrap the old.