[toronto-lisp] SGML, Scheme and a historical anecdote

[Vishvajit Singh]

I find that this topic is one upon which people often have strong
opinions. I don't wish to fan the fires of this debate, but I have one
small thing to say.

>The Web would have been more successful if another structure had been
used.

I'm not sure about that. Even now, I sometimes use a text editor to
edit my HTML files. Imagine if I wanted to italicize a single word in
a large document. In HTML I simply wrap that text with <i>. But if
HTML had used an S-exp syntax, I would have to perform the following
operation:

Starting with: (html (body "........large block of text..........."))

Split it into: (html (body "........block1......."
"word-to-be-italicized" "......block2......"))

Wrap it with the i tag: (html (body "........block1......." (i
"word-to-be-italicized") "......block2......"))

It would be difficult to perform this operation while keeping the
document somewhat comprehensible, whereas in HTML the <i> is quite
unobtrusive to the eye.

Perhaps in these modern times I shouldn't still be using a text editor
for this. At the very least I should use some sort of structure
editor, or some Emacs macros. But imagine how this issue would have
slowed the adoption of the early Web.

I'm making a historical point only. That markup languages won in this
particular domain at this particular point in history doesn't mean
they're actually a good solution to other problems. But I think it's
worth understanding why they won.

Vish

On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 2:46 PM, Rudolf Olah <omouse at gmail.com> wrote:
> Vishvajit Singh wrote:
>> My simple approach to the question of markup languages vs. s-expressions is:
>>
>> Generally prefer s-exps for structured data, but in the special case
>> of data in which the leaf nodes are the main player, containing most
>> of the data, then markup languages sometimes make sense. So, for
>> example, web pages are mostly text, so it's annoying to worry about
>> the text being an element within a larger tree. It's easier to
>> consider the text as the main player, with "markup" around it.
>>
> Markup languages are a horrible idea. They mix the idea of content with
> structure and with style. Content can be made to fit within different
> structures and different styles can be applied to those structures.
> Markup makes it impossible to cleanly copy content from page to another
> because you have to first remove the structure.
>
> Ted Nelson wrote about why markup languages are awful: Embedded Markup
> Considered Harmful --> http://www.xml.com/pub/a/w3j/s3.nelson.html
>> So, the original idea of HTML is a great idea. The web would have been
>> less successful if they had chosen a sexp-based syntax, because it
>> would have been more difficult for ordinary people to create their own
>> webpages.
>>
> The Web would have been more successful if another structure had been
> used. As it is, almost no one can use or design a graphical tool for
> designing web pages because of the HTML mess. You aren't supposed to
> deal directly with the data format because you could make a mistake and
> make it invalid. We don't edit music file tags directly by hand, do we?
>> However, I think extending this idea to the problem of general data
>> representation is a bad one. XML is overly verbose (the name of every
>> node in the tree needs to be entered twice) and therefore hard to
>> read. And don't get me started on XSLT.. I spent a summer working with
>> that once. (Not something I wish to remember.)
>>
>> In the general case of arbitrarily structured data, I think s-exps are
>> both easier to parse and more human-readable than XML.
>>
> Depending on the structure, it might be better to store it as a binary
> file of some sort and then give tools to users/developers to interact
> with the data in a safe way. I have never understood why we don't trust
> data from the user and clean it up in web & desktop applications but
> then completely ignore that when it comes to configuration files, XML,
> HTML, etc.
>
> It all comes down to trade-offs and determining what the goals of the
> data format are.
>
> So Mr Penton, if you want to use s-expressions instead of XML-looking
> markup, then you'll have to determine what the goal of XML is and
> whether or not it is worthwhile to follow in their footsteps. Remember,
> not everything is best represented as a tree.
>
> -Rudolf Olah
>