On 11/15/2013 01:34 PM, Pete Cordell wrote:
>
> Plus I think coding activity (at least traditionally) is all about
> organising stuff and constraining chaos. Even on a good day, when
> you've dotted all your "I"s and crossed all your "T"s, things rarely
> go as well as you'd hope. Thus when something with a "name" parameter
> is added to a system they want to quickly answer unequivocally "which
> name is that?" and bolt it down as quickly as possible to limit the
> increased entropy. The XML practitioners approach seems to be "Yo,
> more names. Cool. We'll put you over here to start with, but we might
> move you later."
>
> Kind of like getting someone with OCD and a pot smoking hippy to work
> together!
There's OCD stuff in the XML world too, and it was there right from the
start, it just has a different flavor: DTD. The whole "DOCTYPE must be
conveyed with the document" religion created the concept of a document
that isn't complete without being processed by its accompanying DTD.
The result is a programmer's nightmare, but makes sense to a certain
kind of document purist.
-Mike
