Tags and S-Expressions

[bmeric]

XML sample
<WEIGHT unit="pound">
<NET certified="certified">67</NET>
<GROSS>95</GROSS>
</WEIGHT>

S-Expressions sample
(WEIGHT (@ (unit "pound"))
(NET (@ (certified)) 67)
(GROSS 95)
)

S-Expression and tag based markup syntax are very similiar, only difference i can find was s-expressions is more readable and html has unnecessary closing tags( (something arg) vs. <something>arg</something>)

So, my question is why html/xml guys choosed tags instead of s-expressions. Especially first years of web when bandwidth and speed was very important.

Thanks in advance

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

bmeric <baris...@gmail.com> writes:

> So, my question is why html/xml guys choosed tags instead of
> s-expressions. Especially first years of web when bandwidth and speed
> was very important.

They did not. They just used what they were told to use. They have no
brain, they don't think things through, they're just drones.

The one who made a decision, was Tim Berners-Lee. His job was to build
a document management system, and at that time, document management
meant SGML. HTML is defined by a SGML DTD (or should have been).

As for bandwidth objection, Tim's contract wasn't to develop a system to
share pages of porn and viagra advertising across countries, but to
share scientific documents amongst researchers on the LAN of the CERN.
They had at least 100 Mb/s ethernet at the time to run it. Notice that
nowdays, we also have 100 Mb/s optic fiber IP connections, in big
cities, so we could stop with the porn and viagra, and start sharing
scientific documents, build a space ship and spaceward Ho!

So, I'd say that globally, Tim did a good job, given his contract and
specifications.

To answer your question however, we should consider another one who
made a decision. J'accuse Steve Jobs! (or one of his minions).

When Steve Jobs was shown the Interface Builder written by Jean-Marie
Hullot, it was a Lisp program. Steve Jobs grabbed it, but instead of
developing the NeXTSTEP GUI framework in Lisp, he had it rewritten in
Objective-C. If they had left NeXTSTEP in Lisp, then Tim would have
written his HTTP server and browser in Lisp, and would have noticed the
uglyness of SGML/HTML compared to Lisp Sexps, and would probably have
used Sexps instead of HTML. After all, there was already at the time
several document processing systems written in Lisp.

And nowadays, there would be no PHP, no Javascript, and no sillyness on
the web, just lisp!




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Development
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marie_Hullot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Builder

--
__Pascal Bourguignon__
http://www.informatimago.com