On Fri, Aug 09, 2002 at 02:58:18PM -0700, Sean Barrett wrote:
"We're going to need a real markup syntax,
consistent, predictable,
documented, bug free, and with all the features needed..."
But we MUST NOT violate the sacred principle of Not Invented Here, which
strictly forbids the use of the markup language that has real markup
syntax, consistent, predictable, documented, bug free, and with all the
features needed ... HTML.
</sarcasm>
Apart from the fact that you forgot an opening tag you are right of course.
If consistency, et cetera, was all we wanted then HTML (I'd actually prefer
XML) would be an excellent solution. There are even more advantages:
- There are good free XML parsers in PHP out there, so writing a parser
would be relatively trivial and it would be easy to get total control over
what XML is allowed.
- Documenting the mark-up could simply be done by defining a DTD.
- Combined with CSS and/or XSL we would have an excellent way to separate
content and presentation.
- Our internal format would at the same time be the best possible export
format.
- Any extension we will think of in the future can be easily
integrated then. (That's what the X in XML promises, anyway. :-))