[Gllug] belated comment on XML

[Rev Simon Rumble]

This one time, at band camp, t.clarke wrote:
> Having been forced to extract data from an XML shipping-manifest and thus
> figure out some of XML's complexities, I can't help feeling that the language
> suffers from being designed by committee.

Yes.  By this committee:
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/stdsdevelopment/tc/tclist/TechnicalCommitteeDetailPage.TechnicalCommitteeDetail?COMMID=4767

and then this committee:
http://www.w3.org/XML/

Standards don't have to be perfect, just uniformly applied, to be
useful.

And you should be using libraries, viewers and the like, not
attempting to grok it in text.  XML _is_ human-readable, but then so
is Perl.  Ostensibly.  Human-readability has been sacrificed,
somewhat, to internal rigour.

-- 
Rev Simon Rumble <simon at rumble.net>
www.rumble.net

 "The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining
  armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos
  neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling
  second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place."
- Douglas Adams on Windows '95.
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