XML is Not Bad
Created on 2020-10-15T22:11:40+00:00
- I used to hate XML because it was obnoxious to edit by hand.
- You were not intended to edit XML by hand.
- SGML *was* however and included various cheats to make doing so suck less.
- SGML was intended such you would customize the DTD to your use case and use a transform step to make the data regular.
- XML is a format for machines that a human can inspect. It was not a format for humans to be forced to write, then ultimately rebel and reject.
Tools like Pandoc and Asciidoctor are good.
You write the bulk of your prose in something which does not require fiddling and only insert special markup in places it makes sense to do so.
But now we just toss the markup files around on their own. This is not as good since our toolchains only know how to deal with whatever markup the operator used.
So basically markup (markdown, asciidoctor, texinfo) are good, but we should be compiling the results to SGML/XML.