That's a wonderful rant - I particularly appreciate the digression into anti-bush rhetoric - but:
1. There's very little detail here; it's a nicely worded, emotionally charged piece that leaves a lot of detail unaddressed, e.g. "'I would like to hear why you think it is so bad, can you be more specific please?' If you really need more information, search the Net, please." That's not very helpful.
2. It argues for 'simpler' markup via the removal of attributes. Where possible, I totally agree, as at least hinted at in my original post. Sometimes, though, this would be impossible or unwieldy (e.g. HREF attribute on an A element).
3. Character entities vs. unicode - totally agree. Wherever possible, I use proper unicode characters rather than ugly character entities in my markup.
4. "But the one thing I would change the most from a markup language ... is to go for a binary representation." Linus would vehemently disagree on this point.
with key words being "Whather what you are really after is foo, bar, or zot, depends on your application.".
His articles on SGML are mandatory reading too.
Several years ago someone posted these links and it opened wonderful world of Lisp to me. Not the language per se (there are many languages) but whole another Universe of how things could be done. I swear I jumped on the chair reading every page of CL standard, how brilliant it is on every level to C. Eventually it led me to rethink attitude to C and Unix in general, core parts of which I despise now.
So here am I returning favor, maybe someone will follow these links too.
1. There's very little detail here; it's a nicely worded, emotionally charged piece that leaves a lot of detail unaddressed, e.g. "'I would like to hear why you think it is so bad, can you be more specific please?' If you really need more information, search the Net, please." That's not very helpful.
2. It argues for 'simpler' markup via the removal of attributes. Where possible, I totally agree, as at least hinted at in my original post. Sometimes, though, this would be impossible or unwieldy (e.g. HREF attribute on an A element).
3. Character entities vs. unicode - totally agree. Wherever possible, I use proper unicode characters rather than ugly character entities in my markup.
4. "But the one thing I would change the most from a markup language ... is to go for a binary representation." Linus would vehemently disagree on this point.