In article <1156317071.18946.246.camel@l...> you write:
>> Any idiot can make up a better markup language than XML, and many idiots 
>> in fact do so.

>I think this is a very condescending statement about the people like
>David Megginson who put XML together. Saying that it only takes an idiot
>to do better. You obviously have no understanding of the skills,
>hardships, determination and sacrifices of any person who tries to
>advance the common knowledge.

You have completely misunderstood Rick's message.

For any given purpose, XML is unlikely to be the ideal markup language.
It would often be easier to write a better markup language for that
particular purpose.  That's not a criticism of Dave Megginson or any
of the others who developed XML; they too could easily invent better
markup languages for those purposes.

The point is that you need to consider whether the advantages of your
special-purpose language outweigh the advantages of using a
standardized language such as XML.  If you use XML your markup will be
a bit uglier, probably more verbose, but you won't have to design it
or write a parser or serializer for it.  And quite likely some of the
things you want to do with it will be doable with existing generic
tools like XSLT.  In the end you may decide that the advantages of a
special-purpose language outweigh the disadvantages, but you should at
least consider the question.

Now of course most of the people who unnecessarily invent new markup
languages aren't "idiots".  But you're not meant to treat pithy
comments that literally.

-- Richard