Stephen Waterbury wrote:The premise that XML had a coherent design intent stetches my credulity beyond its elastic limit.
the design goals are listed in section 1.1 of the specification.
see tim bray's annotated spec for additional comments by one of the team members:
http://www.xml.com/axml/testaxml.htm
(make sure to click on all (H)'s and (U)'s in that section for the full story).
Thanks, Fredrik, I hadn't seen that. My credulity has been restored to its original shape. Whatever that was. :)
However, now that I have direct access to the documented design goals (intent) of XML, it's interesting to note that the intent Steve Holden imputed to it earlier is not explicitly among them:
Steve Holden wrote:
It seems to me the misunderstanding here is that XML was ever intended to be generated directly by typing in a text editor. It was rather intended (unless I'm mistaken) as a process-to-process data interchange metalanguage that would be *human_readable*.
Not unless you interpret "XML shall support a wide variety of applications" as "XML shall provide a process-to-process data interchange metalanguage". It might have been a hidden agenda, but it certainly was not an explicit design goal.
(The "human-readable" part is definitely there: "6. XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear", and Steve was also correct that generating XML directly by typing in a text editor was definitely *not* a design intent. ;)
if you think that the XML 1.0 team didn't know what they were doing, you're seriously mistaken. it's the post-1.0 standards that are problematic...
Agreed. And many XML-based standards.
- Steve -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
