Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

> Michael Rueger <m.rueger at acm.org> wrote:
> 	You can use XSLT (or any other transformation) to generate whatever you 
> 	like. Take a look at the Rosetta project for examples.
> 	
> XSLT isn't the world's worst programming language; that's Intercal.
> But it may very well be the second worst.  It's ridiculous when C code

That's why I wrote "any other transformation" :-)

> 
> 	You get multi-lingual character encoding for free.
> 	
> You only get multi-lingual character encoding when your Smalltalk system
> supports it.  (One commercial Smalltalk whose manual I happen to have handy

You are right. I already corrected/amended my statement in another email.

> 	If you don't use some of the more bizarre features of XML like entity 
> 	declaration and inline substitution you can use an extremely simple parser.
> 	
> That is, XML is great if you don't actually use XML.  Not really a
> recommendation, is it?

Well, at least not for the people who came up with some of the braindead 
features of XML ;-)

> faster than "if I see this parse tree pattern I do this".  Just because
> it is XML that is being matched to see what should be done doesn't make
> it anything other than "simulated evaluation".	

Yes and no. What I was referring to was to actual evaluation that now 
takes place in the interpretation of the chunk format. If you look at 
just parsing the expressions then you're probably right.

To me XML is a structured file format and nothing more. If not abused it 
solves a number of problems that I/we would need to find solutions for 
anyways. There are tons of viewers, validators etc out there that we can 
make use of, web browsers can display it in a structured way etc.
I'm just sick of the not-invented-here syndrom...

Michael