I agree with you about #1. In fact, whenever I make these comments I actually assume that Unicode support is a given and don't think of it as something that should be highlighted. Also it is cumbersome to write "S-expressions with better unicode support" instead of plain old S-expressions (or CSV). :)
-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Bray [mailto:]
Sent: Sun 2/2/2003 9:16 AM
To: Dare Obasanjo
Cc: Uche Ogbuji; Mike Champion; ;
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Elliotte Rusty Harold on Web Services
Dare Obasanjo wrote:
> <personal-opinion> If most of our users could get the following with CSV or S-expressions (I am such a broken record) I'm not sure they'd stick with XML besides the fact that it has been overhyped to death. I think this list of features would include
You left out two things that I think have been big in XML's catching on:
1. Clean internationalization (Larry Wall: "An XML document knows what
encoding it's in.")
2. Deterministic error handling.
I think the importance of #1 is still widely underestimated. And I
think #1 and #2 together are the things that really set XML apart from
S-expressions and ASN.1 and the other credible competition. -Tim
