[cells-devel] undersold aspect of cells

[Ken Tilton]

Now there's a subject line to wake up to in the morning! :)

Andy Chambers wrote:
> Hey Kenny,
> 
> Here's an aspect of cells that I haven't seen highlighted before.
> 
> The html macros I made pretty much constitute a schema for html.  Not
> only does it
> concisely say what attributes are allowed on each element, but it gives you the
> object model for dealing with instances of these elements, and a nice set of
> macros for easily creating them.
> 
> A couple of "validation" defmethods and I think we've got something that may be
> better even than relax-ng (the unstated assumption here is that its
> not hard to be
> better than xml schema).

I took a look at relax-ng. Pretty scary. And fascinating, that XML has 
conditioned them such that relax-ng is considered concise. :) No Real 
Lisper would look at that stuff for more than two seconds before dashing 
off some macrology.

> I know that lispers generally aren't that fond of xml but I bet there
> are a few that
> use it on their day job (as someone who's day job involves dealing with CDISC's
> various models it certainly is important for me).

Ah, CDISC! I guess you saw my blog entry on that clinical trial 
management software I did in Lisp. Too bad we could not sell it.

Yes, Lispers do a lot of this stuff. I appreciate the kind words on 
Cells, but I think in this case the credit goes to lisp and macrology -- 
I think whenever a Lisper wraps X they do not just wrap it, they also 
add value by making X easier to generate and harder to get wrong.

If you look at cl-opengl they went too far, IMHO, but it gives an idea 
anyway of the Lisp ethic: Don't Just Wrap!


> 
> Since you're using your blog as a lisp/cells advocacy platform, maybe you could
> demonstrate this by creating a few macros that do a similar thing for
> RSS.

That's Interwebby stuff, right? :)

I am going to see if I can get Hunchentoot built -- think we'll have 
something for me to show to ECLM 2008?

kenny