MSDN has published "The XML Litmus Test - Understanding When and Why to Use XML" article by Dare Obasanjo. Cool and useful stuff. But an example of inappropriate XML usage I believe is chosen quite poorly - in such kind of articles samples must be clear and clean, while sample of using XML as a syntax for programming languages is rather debatable and dubious. Sure, o:XML syntax is terrible, but there is another highly succesful for years now programming language, whose syntax is pure XML and which was created in just one year and which just rocks. After all choosing non-XML syntax for XML-processing language is not a trivial decision too and in a recent wave of the "Why *is* XQuery taking so long?" permathread in the xml-dev it was clearly stated that one of the reasons XQuery is being developed so many years was the complexity brought by the choice of a non-XML syntax:
2. Syntax issues. The mix of an XML syntax for construction with a keyword syntax for operations is intuitive for users, but has required a lot of work on the grammar side.
Jonathan Robie, http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200410/msg00129.html
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