Re: MinML: an experimental, more concise meta-syntax for XML and HTML

Bryan, Michael and all, hello.

On 4 Jan 2023, at 10:20, Michael Kay wrote:

> Thanks for sharing. This kind of project is great fun: I did something 
> similar with a group of students under the name FtanML -
>
> https://balisage.net/Proceedings/vol10/html/Kay01/BalisageVol10-Kay01.html

I fully agree it's great fun, and my own contribution to the playpit is 
<https://nxg.me.uk/dist/lx/>, which is a syntax intended to look like 
the 'sexp' syntax that various Lisps use, which is parseable into a SAX 
stream (so the consumer of that stream doesn't have to know that it 
didn't originate in pointy brackets).

When I was thinking about that, I was concerned with very markup-heavy 
'texts' (such as XSLT), as opposed to the more traditional use-case 
(which I think MinML is aimed at?) where there is more text than markup.

Also, I just find the homogeneity of sexps really pretty!

> and it's not difficult to do a lot better than XML on many measures 
> (but beware the end tag problem: counting brackets in ">>>>>>>>>" gets 
> tedious).

Indeed (though the ')))))' problem is a non-problem if you have anything 
resembling a lisp head on you, or if you're using a programmer's editor; 
I agree this isn't everyone).

> The sad fact though is that standards like ASCII, the Qwerty keyboard, 
> and XML survive for centuries because the cost of change is higher 
> than the benefit. They might be displaced in particular areas, but 
> there needs to be a very strong incentive to change in an area where 
> the cost of breaking compatibility is not too high. That's a high 
> hurdle to get over.

I think this is the big/deep/core point.

I'd guess that lots of  people have favourite ways that the XML syntax 
is Annoying, but it's a very 'engineer's' solution, which isn't pretty, 
but which is stable because it's being pulled in so many different 
directions at once.  I suspect large chunks of the various constraints 
would have to change, before the solution space would change enough to 
make a radically different syntax something other than a minority taste.

Best wishes,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  https://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK

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