| "That does not seem to be to be typical XML, and if it is, it's really being stretched to do something it's not intended to do, IMO. XML's strength is in representing tree-based structures, but that appears to be an attempt to represent an associative structure. " It's fairly typical of the XML I've used, and well within what XML was intended to do. That some (many?) people end up with needlessly verbose markup is not the fault of XML. Some people write verbose Scheme. Go figure. A major point of XML is just simply tree data, but meta-data. You first showed a basic, non-annotated list; I showed a list with meta-data. Seems that you didn't like how the s-exp version of that XML looked, so you changed that use case. "But in doing that, the structure really looks off, even though it's almost exactly mirroring the XML. I think this is a clue that the XML is a bit of a stretch. " Or just maybe it's an example where XML differs from s-exps. "Part of the problem with XML is that it causes these huge debates about how to structure and name the data." Not really. I mean, some people like that stuff (I see it as a bike shed thing; it's a chance to show off how complex people can make something), but many other folks find a sparse, good-enough structure and move on. Quite honestly, the way you exaggerated the initial example is pure strawman. And you can have the same arguments about representation using s-expressions. Don't blame a syntax because it allows people to be dopey. I can see how nicely s-exp can work for markup, but I'm still curious how name-spaces, schema, ID + IDREF, transclusion, and other XML features are handled in s-expressions. I mostly get the feeling that the only real gripe about XML is the duplication in the closing tags. (The W3C has explained why they dropped the short-form of XML and went with explicit end tags.) |