[Axiom-developer] XML

[daly]

having lost a year of my life working with XML, XSLT, DOM, SAX, JDOM, etc.
i can honestly say that i'm religiously opposed to XML.

you're welcome to try to convince me otherwise but i warn you that it
is a hard fight as i have a lot of really bad war stories. XML is a
dead-end technology. it is the PL/I of web standards. i'd bet you don't
program in PL/I (which i did) and you won't use XML in 5 years.

that said, this IS open source so you're welcome to pursue the path
you feel will be best regardless of the curmudgeon in the corner.

if we do plan to rewrite the syntax of browser pages i'd prefer a
lisp-like syntax which would allow us to (a) use the lisp (read)
and (b) define functions dynamically. this would be especially useful
as most of the new browser is to be implemented in lisp. so instead of

<a href="foo.html">foo</a>

you get something like:

(anchor "foo.html" "foo")

however the browser pages are fairly close to latex and the latex-wiki
code can display latex so why rewrite them completely? besides there
is functionality there which does not exist in XML. For instance you'll
see pages which say:

\spadcommand{x:=2}\bound{x}
\spadcommand{y:=3}\bound{y}
\spadcommand{x*y}\free{x}\free{y}

clicking on the third expression tells the browser that it needs to 
find a meaning for x and a meaning for y somewhere prior in the page.
these are determined by the \bound expression.

given the 90 days and assuming 100 lines of code per day (ah, to have
such productivity i'd give a leg) we're talking 9k lines of code for
the summer. 

t