Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 09:15:49 -0800 From: Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> Cc: arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: syslog.conf syntax change (multiple program/host specifications) Message-ID: <200302131715.MAA21247@agamemnon.cnchost.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 12 Feb 2003 18:39:22 PST." <3E4B055A.641E4B6A@mindspring.com>
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> > In my view XML is to data representation what Roman numerals
> > are to math.
>
> *This* belongs in the fortunes database.
:->
> > Rather than repeat all the arguments I'll point you to what
> > knowledgeable people like Erik Naggum have to say about XML
> > (search comp.lang.lisp on groups.google.com). Naggum used to
> > be a strong proponent of SGML until he "saw the light"! A
> > couple of recent thread on XML on comp.lang.lisp are worth
> > browsing.
>
> Erik is hardly unbiased. Back "in the old days" of the early
> 1990's, when we were first discussing the formulation of the
> SGML standard on Usenet, he lost some bitter battles with the
> main SGML guys about representation in DTD's and a number of
> other points. He may or may not be the "forgive and forget"
> type of guy.
Well, of course he is biased; he spent over 6 years of his
life doing SGML before bailing out! Though I doubt he holds
a grudge because of some lost battles. The issue is the
braindeadness of XML, not Naggum. Since no one likely wants
to trawl through comp.lang.lisp, I'll quote a few things
(with message-ids so that you can look them up if you want)
while leaving out his colorful choice phrases.
Please excuse the length of this message; I got carried away :-)
In <3239150725773370@naggum.no>
I do not consider myself "next generation" anything, but I have contributed
to GNU Emacs just short of a decade, was a world-renown expert on SGML and
related standards until I wrote a book about it and realized that 97.5% of
SGML is braindamaged and I could not gloss over it, anymore. ...
In <3239282082503601@naggum.no> he says:
* Paolo Amoroso
| Could you elaborate on the 2.5% of SGML that is not braindamaged? What
| ideas are worth saving? Do such ideas also live somewhere else (e.g., in
| XML)?
To start from the end, the ideas survived unchanged in XML, neither improved
nor weakened. The first core idea is hierarchical structuring of information.
Lisp has had this forever. The second is textual representation. Lisp has
had this forever. The third is validatability of the structure. Lisp has no
notion of this separate from the semantics of special operators or the usual
evaluation rules. The fourth is an entity structure that allow documents to
share components. Lisp does this by loading things into the image and the
`require'/`provide' pair of deprecated operators. From there on it is all
downhill for the SGML family.
The really grave mistakes include the element-attribute dichotomy, the new
syntax for every meta-level, such as the attribute-value syntax, the qouting
conventions, character entities and references, document type definitions,
and ultimately the sgml declaration, the primitive language for content
models, the changing syntax according as features are supported or not, the
redundant end-tag, and failure to use a simple escaping mechanism for
characters that could be confused as markup with the character references as
data adding additional complexity. The sheer complexity of parsing SGML and
XML and presenting it to the caller lies mainly in the syntactic mess and
the utter lack of an intelligent model for in-memory representation. (DOM
is completely braindamaged with no redeeming qualities.)
...
In <3239316488198320@naggum.no> he says:
* Oleg <oleg_inconnu@myrealbox.com>
| Who said proper nesting is intrinsically a good thing, silly rules made up
| by mortals notwithstanding?
It is not the proper nesting that is the problem. It is the infinitely stupid
separation of start- and end-tags. If you wrote @bold{foo} instead of
<bold>foo</bold>, you would not even /want/ to say @bold{foo @italic{bar}
zot} if you expected to get foo in bold, zot in italic, and bar in both.
The stupidity of <bold>foo<italic>bar</bold>zot</italic> is not in nesting,
it is in the moronic syntax. ...
...
The otherwise pretty smart people who dreamt up generalized markup (which is
itself an important abstraction that few people have made independently)
made a very serious mistake in making "tags" independent constructs of the
element. Yes, abstract elements have starts and ends, but it is a serious
mistake to make both sides verbose and explicit. ...
...
When you give people verbose, explicit edges of elements, they will think of
them the wrong way. It is not proper nesting that they do not understand.
It is the fact that they see a kind of different edges than the syntax wants
to represent. ...
...
In many important ways, SGML is its own worst enemy. It has managed to
teach information structuring completely backwards. Instead of making the
edges explicit but non-intrusive as in Common Lisp, the edges are much too
visible and verbose with the stupid tags that very quickly consume more of
the large volume of characters in SGML/XML documents than the contents. I
am sure it was thought of as useful back when people needed to be converted,
but once converted, it gets in the way more than anything else and leads
people to make mistakes if they do not think very carefully about what they
try to do. ...
In <3239423919385905@naggum.no> he says:
* Johan Kullstam
| Yes, but this what is stupid. The rules of the language says you
| *must* properly nest the tags. However, the syntax suggests that not
| nesting is possible. Why else introduce the verbose closing tag
| unless you could close something else than the last opened tag?
Historically, the idea was that omitted start- and end-tags should be
inferrable. This is a bad idea for a large number of very good reasons, and
XML did away with them, which is the same kind of improvement that drowning
at a depth of 10 feet is an improvement over drowning at a depth of 100
feet, but in a Stroustrupesque move, XML decided to keep the antiquated
end-tags which had now survived their usefulness. The whole syntax was an
improvement over its predecessors in 1970, but after it had been adopted, it
should have been further improved. ...
In <3241162747773498@naggum.no> he says:
* synthespian
| I don't understand your point of view, in the light of the fact that a
| couple of weeks ago you said that SGML and XML were "braindead."
Well, let me put it this way: The XML crowd believes that if you only add
enough markup, everything humankind has ever dreamt of will suddenly emerge
from the chaos. I believe that this is a very serious misunderstanding of
both chaos and emergent properties and that more markup will, in fact,
prevent them from emerging. XML-style markup effectively prohibits the
multiple perspectives on the same information that makes it usable for
multiple purposes. In this sense, the more you employ XML to achieve your
goals, the more irrelevant the result will become.
In <3242173964750774@naggum.no>:
| Am I wrong in assuming that with XML you are roughly as safe as you would be
| with a _documented_ binary format?
It is a myth that XML is documented. You have no idea what the elements
/actually/ mean (and have warped into over time) until you see the source code
for the application. XML becomes /more/ application-dependent over time than
binary formats because it provides a false security and an appearance that
belies its true nature. XML /is/ a binary format, it is just that it is the
kind of binary formats that line printers and raw text editors can use, too,
and it is no less dependent on the exactness and precision that other binary
formats require. At least when you have a binary format, you know that you
need to have a version field and proper version management. People who think
SGML or XML will save them tend to forget version management and rely on
stupid human tendencies to believe that that which they can "read" must also
be understandable to the machine. ...
In <3242255304507299@naggum.no>
* Tim Josling
| XML is an encoding format, no more than that.
You may find it illuminating to do a web search on my name and SGML.
| It is a pretty good encoding format because it is relatively simple and
| semi-human-readable, though verbose. Compare with the alteratives - ad hoc
| binary formats or the IEEE's binary format monstrosity whose name I forget.
As long as you actually believe that such are the alternatives, yes, XML is
better than the completely braindamaged. However, if you start to think
about the problem, XML starts to become an idiotic non-solution that only
creates more problems than it solves. It has all the disadvantages of an ad
hoc binary format, and none of the benefits -- namely compactness and
version sensitivity.
...
| You can't blame this on XML.
I can, and I do. Languages come with philosophies from which they cannot be
separated. The XML philosphy is stale, stupid, and counter-productive
relative to its own stated goals, among which the most important was supposed
to be the independence of data from the application, which is actually worse
with XML than even /your/ "alternatives".
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