From owner-freebsd-arch Thu Feb 13 9:16: 0 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 975DF37B401 for ; Thu, 13 Feb 2003 09:15:55 -0800 (PST) Received: from agamemnon.cnchost.com (agamemnon.cnchost.com [207.155.252.31]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4D0BA43F93 for ; Thu, 13 Feb 2003 09:15:53 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from bakul@bitblocks.com) Received: from bitblocks.com (adsl-209-204-185-216.sonic.net [209.204.185.216]) by agamemnon.cnchost.com id MAA21247; Thu, 13 Feb 2003 12:15:50 -0500 (EST) [ConcentricHost SMTP Relay 1.15] Message-ID: <200302131715.MAA21247@agamemnon.cnchost.com> To: Terry Lambert Cc: arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: syslog.conf syntax change (multiple program/host specifications) In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 12 Feb 2003 18:39:22 PST." <3E4B055A.641E4B6A@mindspring.com> Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 09:15:49 -0800 From: Bakul Shah Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > > 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 | 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 foo, 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 foobarzot 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". To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message