@leoncowle yeah, but you can use it for a lot more than just displaying. like you could annotate the parts of speech in a sentence. or break down a book into chapters and passages. or annotate who said what, or where an idea came from
@john it was popular when i started my career and the reason i hated it was that it didn’t map to objects very well, e.g. there isn’t one single way to represent an array.
it’s actually not that verbose (depending on how you represent objects and arrays), and imo asthetics aren’t a great metric for choosing technology since it’s so volatile over time.
another reason was the ecosystem — it got complicated fast
@kellogh@leoncowle yeah, it doesn’t map to objects because it’s a different type of structure, right? A necessary one too!
I think aesthetics are more important than many people think, as it goes to readability. I suffer from very poor comprehension of code, and noisy syntax kills me.
@kellogh@leoncowle yeah, as I said earlier, I haven’t seen a better alternative. I think angle brackets are quite ugly in text, it might be as simple as that.
I mean, in your example you could be using white space and ditch the brackets, but that doesn’t work for other structures.
@john@leoncowle my issues with whitespace-only is that it fails the "partial transfer" test. i've seen a ton of times when a file gets half-transferred (for a lot of dumb reasons). i like formats with delimiters so that the file doesn't parse if it wasnt' fully transferred
e.g. you should be able to delete half the file at any point and it should no longer parse
@kellogh@leoncowle good point. I do generally like white space syntax for reading and writing, but it’s got some limitations for sure. How do you do <inline>tokens</inline> for example?
@kellogh@john Love this thread so far! PS Tim, I think John was saying (agreeing) that the XML <inline>tokens</inline> would be difficult to do in white space syntax (‘it's got some limitations, for sure’), not asking how you'd do it. :-)
@leoncowle@kellogh Indeed, the inline tokens thing is something I’ve thought about a lot, since I sort accidentally invented the javascript templating thing I used for my site which I called “Jarkdown” (javascript objects + markdown for inline html bits and bobs). It's certainly no nicer than XML.
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