On May 17, 10:17 pm, r...@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote:
>   Is it so verbose?
>
>   The major redundancy I see is the end tag.
>
>   But that's about it.
>
>   On might say that a Java call
>
> item("xyz789",3,29.99,1234567890)
>
>   is shorter to denotate the item, but this is only possible if
>   there are not many more possible attributes (which are omitted
>   above). Otherwise one needs a means to indicate which
>   attributes are given and which are omitted. But the XML call
>   with the attribute names is more readable.
>
>   When one tries to come up with something that is better than XML,
>   one sees that this is not that easy.
>   One might be able to do some fine tuning here and there.
>
>   Verbosity is not annoying as long as one gains something by it.
>   When one gains readability or robustness, it can be accepted.

Trying to come up with a way to nest tags without proper tag closing
is a nightmare, so I can hardly consider closing tags redundant.

On finding something better than XML... Well, depends entirely on what
you're trying to achieve. XML is a great way to deal with information
that can be effectively rendered as a decorated tree, but you'll often
see many other data types shoehorned into XML files. In particular,
text-encoded binary information embedded in XML files is the spawn of
a hundred devils.

(More on topic: "can hardly consider", or "can't hardly consider"? a
quick googling of "hardly" yields several cases of "can't hardly",
but, to me, that parses as an equivalent of "could care less".)