RE: [xml-dev] Is "Hand Authoring" XML still a critical use case ?

(I had sent this email earlier today, but it seems to have gone lost somewhere. My apologies if you get it twice.)

> Is Hand Authored XML really an important issue nowadays ?

I assume you came to this question with JSON in mind. An interesting perspective arises when you compare JSON's (see json.org):

  "[JSON] is easy for humans to read and write."

to XML's (see XML design goals):

  "XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear."
  "XML documents shall be easy to create."

The XML design goals do not seem to imply that hand-authoring of XML be always possible/easy; JSON, on the the hand, seems to be more explicit about being hand-authoring friendly. (But of course, without defining what "to write"/"to create" actually mean, this is just one of the N possible interpretations...)

Vojtech

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Vojtech Toman
Consultant Software Engineer
EMC | Information Intelligence Group

http://developer.emc.com/xmltech