http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xml-20001006

It's huge, introducing needless syntax and complexity for no real gain
in expressive power or clarity.  Mimimal XML looks simple, but once you
add in N**2 attribute types, and entities, and a seperate syntax for
DTDs, you end up with parsers as big as the one Franz wrote.

In particular look at the design goals, section 1.1:

----------------------

1.XML shall be straightforwardly usable over the Internet.

2.XML shall support a wide variety of applications.

3.XML shall be compatible with SGML.

4.It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents.

5.The number of optional features in XML is to be kept to the absolute
minimum, ideally zero.

6.XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear.

7.The XML design should be prepared quickly.

8.The design of XML shall be formal and concise.

9.XML documents shall be easy to create.

10.Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.

----------------------

I would say that they completely missed goals 6-8, goals 4 and 9 are
iffy, and I don't know enough to judge goal 3.

   1.XML shall be straightforwardly usable over the Internet.

   2.XML shall support a wide variety of applications.

   3.XML shall be compatible with SGML.

   4.It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents.

   5.The number of optional features in XML is to be kept to the absolute
   minimum, ideally zero.

   6.XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear.

   7.The XML design should be prepared quickly.

   8.The design of XML shall be formal and concise.

   9.XML documents shall be easy to create.

   10.Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.

   ----------------------

   I would say that they completely missed goals 6-8, goals 4 and 9 are
   iffy, and I don't know enough to judge goal 3.

I'm not sure just what experiences make you think that goals 6 and 8
have failed but remember that they have failed only for *some*subsets*
of XML and not the conceptual framework of how to create new markup.

Schemas and DTD's are some of the more wartish aspects, but unless i'm
mistaken meta-programming is difficult to do cleanly even in lisp.

Also some people point out that standards associated with certain
vendors (a certain vendor) are more verbose and complex than they
absolutely have to be. And this mostly so that they can move an
opening into the standard on which they can hook their propietary
code.

Advogato had some discussion of a lisp-like method of handling
XML called Virgule.
http://virgule.sourceforge.net
which i'm thinking of trying out, i'm not sure how much like the lisp
parser it is (it seems to rely heavily on the SAX api which is
event-driven). But it gives me the means to use or define a </lambda>
tag i'll take it. and the syntax looks pretty natural to me, specially
all the &lt; tag-body &gt;

I guess what i'm starting to see is that XML is always a tree and that
whatever is between the tags is either a sub-tree or terminal.

On a totally other topic has anyone else experimented with trying to
import lisp code into python. I've got a rather tatty version of
lisp.py that doesn't seem to do very well in parsing code that clisp
considers acceptable. I'd also like to go the other way and take
python--->clisp bytecode or is that just too ambitious.

Also and the main reason lisp appeals to me is the possibility of
using it to define my own language that solves the problem at hand,
what are the best ways of doing this?

Oh yeah, how do i parse a buffer in lisp? er how do i define a
grammar? er how do i translate the parse-tree into a turing-computable
function??(ok that last term, (turing-computable function) I sort of
know what i meant, but am not sure if i'm using the same language
pointing to the same referent as everyone else here.

  A DTD is a structured document which contains information about elements.
  If SGML/XML were any good, this would have been written with exactly the
  same syntax that is used to describe other data.  However, because they
  were ignorant of the "code is data" concept, they, too, made the mistake
  that "what we think must be good enough for everbody else sure ain't good
  enough for us", and invented their very own syntax for their own needs.

This is not an ironic comment.

But there is _definitely_ a _vast_ difference between him and the
_definite lunaticks_ that operate in a vast number of newsgroups.  He
may say things that are quite spectacularly insulting; this is,
however, _not_ then backed up by saying things that are [from a
technical perspective] spectacularly STUPID.

There are some almost certifiably insane people on can.taxes
[discussing Canadian taxation matters]; they have effectively driven
away almost anyone that is actually credible, unfortunately including
a true luminary in the area, David Sherman, who edits research notes
on both the Canadian Income Tax Act and the Goods & Services Tax.  [If
there exist people who know more about Canadian taxation than he does,
they are likely countable on one hand, most likely without resorting
to use of a thumb...]

Comp.lang.lisp is fairly _fortunate_ to have the participation of
reasonably public luminaries like Kent Pitman, and (arguably with
somewhat lesser "fame") Barry Margolin; #Erik isn't as known "as
luminary," but is _definitely_ exceedingly bright, and is valuable to
have around.

When the flames burn high, that value tends to get obscured; it is
clearer when the questions are amenable to seeing valuable answers as
opposed to being personality clashes where, in the immortal words...

 "It's the sort of mail you should wear a welding helmet while
  reading...."  -- Dave Moon

Note that there are a number of notable characters out there that are
somewhat "prickly."  #Erik is certainly one; David Moon apparently is
another; other notable "prickly" characters include Theo de Raadt
(main OpenBSD guy), John Dysan (a FreeBSD guy), RMS...  Linus Torvalds
is known to swear fairly viciously at people, on occasion, but with
his accent, only BSD folk seem to take it seriously...

  As long as the moralistic bunch of hypocrites tell people that it is OK
  to lambast me for just about anything out of the blue, they perpetuate
  the _myth_ to "newbies" and others that I am somehow harsh to people.
  They forget the _massive_ abuse they have levied on me.  Why do they have
  such a morality that they can gang up someone and behave the way they do?

  It is manifestly not something I do.  Several people have in the past
  crawled out of the woodwork and initiated a witch hunt and an exorcism of
  something that I have never even done, let alone could have done.  It is
  not something I do _to_ them.  It is obviously something _they_ feel, and
  since they are of the moralistic bent, they turn off their ethics and
  commit the most unspeakable evils against whoever think "deserve" it.

  Now, how would you deal with people who are massively irrational and in a
  moral frenzy about killing that which made them feel less than they think
  they should feel, for whatever reason, and it happened to be _yourself_?

  In a technical forum, I expect people to write precisely, to think before
  they post, to know of what they speak, and to listen to technical
  arguments.  I consider a person who enters such a forum under false
  premises, including lack of will to be precise, lack of will to think,
  lack of will to learn, and/or lack of will to listen, to be a _fraud_.
  There is nothing that can be said, on-topic, to such a person to make him
  stop defrauding people.  People do not stop being frauds in real life if
  you give them _more_ money.  They may stop if you give them _no_ money
  and additionally beat them over the head.  The problem, if any, is that
  some people think they have a right to participate in a technical forum
  with no knowledge or valuable contributions to others at _all_.  They
  think of themselvse as "newbies" and think they have the _right_ to waste
  other people's time when they ask vague questions that have no answer, do
  not think about the answers they do get, assume so much that you have no
  idea what they know, what they have just guessed, or what they made up,
  do not actually listen to what anybody say but try to match it to their
  massive set of mostly unconscious assumptions, and refuse to learn
  because they think they have a _right_ to be told correct "answers" to
  their "questions".  In a real physical forum, such people shut up,
  because they actually manage to sense the antipathy they receive from
  people areound them.  On the Net, there is no sense of antipathy.  You
  have to realize that it is there from something you read consciously.  In
  other words, a fraud can set up shop on the Net and nobody will come and
  hit him if they think he is a bastard.  This safetey from reaction causes
  people to behave in counter-productive ways.  It also causes people to
  fire up their righteousness and hurt people much more than they would
  have if they had sensed that people would fight back.  As long as nobody
  can actually be _hurt_ on the Net, this will always continue.  The people
  who keep it up are the frauds, because they are the only people who
  _gain_ by abusing the public trust in the purpose of a technical forum.

Israel Raj Thomas
---------------------------------------------------

Israel Raj Thomas
---------------------------------------------------

Israel Raj Thomas
---------------------------------------------------

Erik, I've often defended some of your more colorful language as harmless
when others have claimed it similarly not contributing.  That didn't
mean I didn't understand how someone's feelings could get hurt; just
that I think at some point we have to rely on the good sense of those
involved to sort out the difference between "statements" and "truth", etc.
I think similarly here, I can understand why you are upset, but I also
think your sparring partner is engaging in "colorful language" and I think
people watching can tell the difference.

I apologize for contributing to off-topic bandwidth and hope that at least
changing the subject line will enable those annoyed by these kinds of
discussions to avoid it.

The odd one-time post by someone unknown to the group is a very different
matter than consistent behaviour from a regular.  Like it or not Erik, your
stature here brings with it responsibility.  Meaning no slight to other
informed and interesting contributers, your posts carry more weight than any
other regular with the exception of Kent Pitman and Barry Margolin.  I may
be basing this on some unconcious personal bias, but to me these three names
more than any others represent the deepest knowledge of lisp in this group.

When you write, you represent the lisp community much, much more than some
random visitor or some long-time lurker.  You can blast the human nature
that needs to revere and emulate perceived experts all you want, but it is a
fact that you will never change by belittling and insulting this "moronic"
behaviour.  People are not computers, you should not deal with them as
though they should be as logical and unemotional as the languages we invent
to program them.  Given these facts, it is your responsibility to behave
more maturely.

You chose not to, I can't change that.  I do however, try to undo some of
the damage you cause.  larry a price did very little damage to the group's
dynamic.

Thse lines are exactly why I harbor no hopes of you ever understanding your
own behaviour in any terms shared by human society.

Please show me any post telling any one what you claim, if it is mine I will
apologise.  If you are meaning an implicit encouragement by silence, I hope
I have explained above my own perspective.  By the way, the best way to
refute any attack on your behaviour is to respond maturely or not at all.

I don't think there's much to be done in such cases but to go calmly meta
and shrug it off.

A quote I picked up from somewhere in my distant past seems near relevant:
"people who worry what others think of them probably overestimate the
frequency with which they do".  Yes, there are things said on this newsgroup
tha,k if read, might scare people off.  In most cases, I bet those same
scare-able people are long gone due to sheer length of post, or irrelevance
of topic, and never survive to the offensive part.  But even so, flamage
is a part of modern life and people need to learn just to skim past it.

Kent M Pitman <pit...@world.std.com> writes:

        ...

Cheers

Threads of this kind appear to offer their subject line as a premise
and create an inappropriate bias to otherwise neutral participants
that is hard to address fairly other than by responding in kind (i.e.,
escalating).  It should not be done.

It also raises what would be an obscure corner of the newsgroup
invisible to most newbie posters to a level of visibility that anyone
sees in the summary of "what we talk about".  I think it's bad in that
regard.

I've really gone back and looked at the logs, and the number of "witch
hunt" posts against erik far outnumber the number of offensive posts
by Erik, especially if you only count the initial posts from Erik and
not the ones that occur after an all-out flamefest on both sides has
been engendered.  And in nearly all cases that I saw where Erik might
be regarded as "attacking first", there is a pretty clear instance of
someone straying from the technical into the a controversial social
observation which any reasonable person thinking ahead could expect
might push someone's buttons.  In the cases where people stick to
technical topics, they pretty much get very high quality technical
responses from Erik and in the case where they drift, Erik "drifts"...

Maybe Erik shouldn't jump on people as quickly as he does in some cases;
that's a subjective judgment some might reasonably have..  But speaking
as objectively as one can in here, merely by counting message posts
and observing the flow, the oil people put on that flame seems to hugely
magnify the problem, and seems to me objectively (to the extent anything
can be objective here) to be worse than the original problem in the sense
of being more visible, more long-running, more painful, more full of
insults than I imagine would likely occur if the incident were simply
ignored.

"Thomas F. Burdick" <t...@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU> wrote in message
news:xcvpuaftxu5.fsf@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU...

Flame:
  1.. vi To post a message intended to insult and provoke.
  2.. vi To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively
uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude.
You can not seriously characterize my writing that way though you are more
than welcome to disagree with my statements.

"Kent M Pitman" <pit...@world.std.com> wrote in message
news:sfw3d7btwvd.fsf@world.std.com...

Coby

  Now, unlike what everybody tells others about me, I do not consider it
  _good_ to flame people who resort to vilification.  It is a _necessary_
  evil, but evil nonetheless.  Some of the people who spend an enormous
  amount of energy vilifying me from here to the end of the world, have
  made it clear that they think it is _good_ to attack me, that they do it
  because they believe they are morally _justified_ in doing it.  This is a
  huge difference.  There is no stopping someone who is morally justified.

  The interesting thing about real life is that people realize very quickly
  how much evil they can get away with towards somebody else.  This means
  that by signalling to others what you will not accept, they refrain from
  doing it in the first place.  Rational self-interest makes people think
  twice about hurting someone if they sense that they can get hurt back.
  This unreduced will to hurt anyone who attacks you is the reason people
  form peaceful societies and human advances such as trust and justice --
  without it, bad people can get away with absolustely anything they want.
  This is the case on the Net and the reasons there are so many bad people
  who abuse it -- take all the worms and viruses and denial-of-service
  attacks with all the bad USENET and WWW cultures.  Ignorants blame the
  absence of real faces and empathy and all kinds of gobbledygook, but the
  _real_ reason is that you can laugh at somebody's fist instead of getting
  hurt by it if _you_ do something bad to somebody else and they hit you
  back.  The absence of a credible threat of violent response fosters evil,
  because those who have evil intentions are in fact only stopped by force.

  The same applies to how people react to corrections.  I may be getting
  worked up at times, but I make a point of not insulting people first, I
  do not think people are stupid, I do not consider or call them morons --
  I simply state what I consider to be true, on technical or philosophical
  matters.  Still, some morons _are_ insulted, because in real life, _they_
  would have signalled a violent response to the prospect of having ideas
  or opinions of that kind presented to them, or particularly the fact that
  they might be wrong.  To some people, a minority of perhaps 5%, it is
  _much_ more important to defend their inflated ego than anything that
  could make their ego _recover_ (such as actually listening to the critics
  and fix what they do wrong) and they will not back down until their ego
  is vindicated.  Obviously, some people will think this applies to me, but
  look carefully at how these vilifiers jump at every opportunity to make
  things much, much worse.  It is impossible for me to make these insane
  guys stop their attacks.  _That_ is the core of the problem.  It has
  nothing to do with what _I_ do, anymore.

Are you blasting Erik's behavior or supporting it?

Stature, responsibility, deepest knowledge, maturity....

Its too bad that people do not behave as you expect.  Perhaps you should
take them off the pedestal that you have created.

I think it's pretty incontrovertible that there would be
less flamage on c.l.l if Erik had a longer fuse. (But there
might also be more drivel. And, as Kent observes, Erik gets
picked on and it's hardly a surprise if he gets annoyed.)

Please note that I pass no comment on the views expressed
in the grandparent of this article, beyond what I've explicitly
said above. In particular, I should not be assumed to agree
with everything in it merely because I think Wade is attacking
it on unreasonable grounds.