Re: Writing technical text

[Steve Block <scblock@ev-15.com>]

On Fri, Oct 21, 2005 at 10:12:14PM -0400, William Ballard wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 21, 2005 at 10:51:07AM +0100, Antony Gelberg wrote:
> > William Ballard wrote:
> > > Single-letter element-centric XML is fairly readable:
> > > 
> > > <o><t/>
> > >   <p><o><p/><e>14</e><e>32</e></o></p>
> > >   <p><o><m/><e>18</e><e>92</e></o></p>
> > > </o>
> >
> > You are joking, right?
>
> You're just not used to it.  Once you get the hang of the "context" -- 
> i.e., in that, <o/> means operation, first child of <o/> is the 
> operator, example operators are times <t/> and plus <p/>, subsequent 
> children of <o/> are operands, valid operands are either sub-operations 
> <o/> or parenthesis <p/> for grouping, <e/> contains only text values 
> which are numbers.
>
> I have carried this kind of thing out to express an entire relational 
> database, including emedded schema, lookups, and computed columns, as a 
> concise XML document that is easy to grasp at a glance and easy to 
> maintain by hand in an editor.
>
> Here is an example.  Look f'd up to you?

Snipping out all the crap...

I think you've misunderstood one of the major purposes of XML, and that
is to be descriptive in tag choices. This is still uncomprehensible and
ugly. I will maintain that XML is meant to be parsed by machines and
that humans should be able to work with something else.

With XML as a valid storage mechanism of course. Like iTunes or OO.o.

--
Steve Block
http://ev-15.com/
http://steveblock.com/
scblock@ev-15.com