Re: address@hidden: RE: cannot find :enable in Elisp manualindex]

[Miles Bader]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:
> I do not know how XML differs from HTML.  Perhaps something makes XML
> harder to edit than HTML; I have no opinion about that.

XML is typically more verbose and picky than html.  It's intended to be
easier to parse (for machines), but a side effect is that it's somewhat
harder/more-annoying to read and write for humans.

E.g. they got rid of the "implicit end tag" stuff from SGML, which is
what allows you to omit the paragraph end-tag (</p>) in html text.
[I think even the paragraph _start_ tag is a small but pervasive
annoyance...]

Existing xml tag-sets like docbook seem to tend towards extreme
verbosity, to the extent that e.g. docbook source text is pretty much
unreadable without something stripping the annotations.  Other tag-sets
may be better, but docbook seems more the norm than an exception.

-miles

-- 
`There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
 Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'