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Comment by mbreese | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that this is a trivial problem. Why add an abstraction on top of something that is already so simple?

My problem with HTML is not its lack of simplicity; it is its verbosity. SHPAML solves the (fairly) trivial problem of making HTML less verbose. The abstraction pays off for me insofar as I expect to use SHPAML for the next decade or so, and it's easy to remember the syntax, easy to share the output, etc.

Yeah, but how many other people will be using it? You may be planning on using it for a decade, but you will be in a very small minority. And so to share the output (the very common and portable HTML), you need to add another step to your workflow to convert things. This just seems like too much effort for very little gain.

If 0.001% of the world's population uses it, I think that comes out to something like 60,000 people.

You can see here that I've already solved the problem of sharing SHPAML output using HTML:

http://shpaml.webfactional.com/

You are right about it adding a step to my workflow. If only there was some kind of machine that could automate things for me...

Well machine language is pretty simple especially when you use something like MIPS. It can even be pretty fun to code in if you assembler has good macro support. However there is value is adding an abstraction layer on top of machine code. I think what people are really trying to say in these comments is that this new mini language does not provide useful value vs HTML like C provides vs. MIPS. Cheers.

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