On Mon, Oct 02, 2000 at 01:24:37PM -0600, Tom Christiansen wrote:
> >XML is intrinsically no more or less difficult to write than HTML.
>
> Wrong.
I beg your pardon?
> >Comparing XML to HTML is pointless, however; they are not the same
> >thing.
>
> Wrong. And you only say that because you will not like the answer.
>
> Go back to the posted example and count bytes of data versus
> bytes of meta data.
Did you read what I wrote?
XML is like SGML. It specifies a generic means of writing structured
text; it says nothing about what that structure is. In particular,
neither XML nor SGML specifies a particular set of tags. HTML is a
particular SGML dialect; as such, it can only be compared to a specific
XML dialect, not XML as a whole.
<example>This <word>is</word> XML.</example>
It is also SGML. It is not, obviously, HTML.
This is <tt>HTML</tt>.
This is <tt>XHTML</tt>.
No difference, really. You do see differences with things like the
<hr> tag; SGML allows the DTD to define certain tags as being atomic,
and XML does not. This means that <hr> must be written as <hr/> in
XHTML.
Now, if you want to compare an XML DTD like DocBook to HTML, you have
a point. DocBook contains whole heaping piles of complexity. I'd
certainly rather write HTML than DocBook by hand.
> I guarantee you that you will drive people away with this crap.
What? I don't think people should be writing either XML or HTML
as the source documentation format. I said that, quite clearly.
- Damien
