Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: documentation as info

[Colin Walters]

On Tue, 2003-09-16 at 19:09, Tom Lord wrote:

> Are you really at a loss to find many of the available critiques of
> XML? 

Oh there are plenty - but I don't think there are any that hold any
water.

Let's take your documentation format, for instance.

1) How do you specify what character set it's in?

XML solves this problem; XML documents declare the character set in use
at the top of the document, and default to UTF-8 (which is well-known
since it's a standard).

2) How can you specify characters outside the range of what you're able
to type?

XML solves this problem using entities.  This is standardized, and all
XML parsers grok them.

3) How can I verify the structure of the document?

XML solves this with XML Schemas and DTDs.  

And moreover, there are *tons* of tools to transform XML documents to
other formats.  Transforming your nonstandard ".doc" format involves
telling people "Oh, you have to get my scheme implementation, and then
this software..."...


These three are just a few examples of Real Problems that XML solves.