David Lyon wrote:

>Liam,
>
>I was reading this article...
>
>http://www.advogato.org/article/820.html
>
>so everything is looking good for an xml 2.0... with datatyping
>and other good stuff...
>
>  
>
i know it's way too late, but here's the thing i dislike most about xml: 
overloading the < symbol.

until 10 years ago this was a "less than" sign and had a partner, the 
"greater than" sign. and it was used that way for about a century and a 
half. and &lt; is for me, one of the unreadables of xml. x < y => x &lt; 
y ???????

now it is an angle bracket and part of a confusing overloading of symbology.

syntactically, xml uses opening symbols of <, <!, <?, </ and <![. as 
these are not white space delimited it is therefore not lr-1 for 
parsing......

however i do like the specific start/end tag stuff and don't want to 
lose it. it would have just been nicer to use a real bracket 
combination. not important in markup (so i'm not flaming anyone) but a 
pain when you extend to data and scripting - rapidly becoming important 
uses of xml.

i chose square brackets for my own markup language - [] - which predates 
xml by about 15 years for exactly this reason.

opinion #1 on this subject.

rick


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