Re: Is XML a language or a data format?

A more productive direction to think about IMO would be to look at
what we (document engineering specialists? markup geeks?) can do to
bring down energy consumption. With that goal in mind, CSS is
particularly and criminally bad I'm afraid, due to its pointless
"cascading" and specificity matching alone, not to speak of its tens
of vague and underspecified yet partly overconstrained layout
algorithms in prose, and thousands of microsyntaxes and procedural
parsing specs nobody is actually using (where CSS 2.1 had a simple
lex/yacc grammar). If we had started to care about energy efficiency
on web sites a bit earlier, rather than allow W3C and others to never
come to an end after 30 year of soul searching and misappropriating
document technologies for app development just to arrive at browser
cartels and other quasi-monopolies, we might have low-cost
solar-powered LCD (monochrome) devices to browse the web available
today that can reasonably be produced on basic CMOS processes from
scratch even in developing countries using nothing except silicium
dioxide plus copper, iron, silver, or other conductive metal plus
nickel, cadmium, and a few other heavy metals which we have in
abundance, all of which can be reasonably melted/separated for reuse
given standardized devices. We had solar-powered pocket calculators
available in late 1970s/early 1980s already.

Cheers,
Marcus Reichardt
sgml.io

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