XML Re: [sldev] Opening the server source?

[dale at daleglass.net]

On Fri, Jul 06, 2007 at 06:48:22AM -0700, Dzonatas wrote:
> Thomas Rowland wrote:
> >While I welcome that, I still think XML is a bit bloated, when most are
> >still paying
> >on a 'bytes transferred' tariff.
> >  
> ...
> That is a good concern, and I agree for that reason.
> 
> XML appears based off of older word processor document formats like Word 
> Perfect, but done with all upper ASCII until of control characters.
XML is based on SGML, which had largely the same goals. XML is a
simplification of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGML

> 
> With that side note, the default XML is very bloated to make sure a 
> variety of XML readers understand the content. It is pointless to force 
> readers to work through highly-portable format when the sender and 
> reader can negotiate a more efficient format. That would be something 
> like what "caps" does in the current SL technology. It is a good feature 
> to have.
XML is bloated to be human readable. For example, the <foo>stuff</foo>
syntax. They could have done <foo>stuff</>, and actually I think SGML
supports that. But take any HTML document, and turn all closing tags
into a </>. Now how do you tell quickly where the effect of <em> or
<strong> is ending? 

Programming languages have it easier due to indentation, but in a XML
document it'd be impractical. 

The nice thing about XML is that it's extensible -- it takes serious
work to design such a format that you can add something extra without
breaking backwards compatibility.

And then, pretty much everybody ends up designing about the same thing
in slightly different ways. As far as I can tell, pretty much everybody
comes up with some way of transmitting key/value pairs.
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