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Comment by wyuenho | Hacker News Reader

XML is a mistake. 80% of every XML document is just redundant noise because the IBM lawyer who invented the SGML syntax had never heard of S-expression.

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The "redundant" noise makes it more human-readable in my opinion. If you're in the weeds of a big XML document that's larger than your viewport, being able to see that you're at the end of a </Address> helps you keep your place, as opposed to something like JSON which I find much easier to get lost in. Even if it's not that big I appreciate the extra rails on the XML making it easier to keep my place.

I consider this a fallacy. The condition you are given is not a common occurence. In the event they do occur, the solution can be found in your editor or viewer. It does not make sense to inject spurious junk into what is designed as a data interchange format, in which includes network information interchange.

There's probably a name for this kind of fallacy that exaggerate the effect of a problem and the resulting contortions that were engineered around it.

Writing documents with S-exprs will get very tedious once you have to deal with stuff like whitespace and such that will inevitably show up when you're dealing with text documents. SGML is specifically optimized for those use cases, which is why it is so much more awkward to use when all you want is serializing some random structured data.

All you need is some sort of Python’s raw string or triple quote or HEREDOC. What’s so hard about that?

Try writing a document that's mostly text, but with plenty of markup interspersed in the middle, in this manner.

We are talking about a configuration language here, which is never about markups. Also, most of the so-called whitespace problem in Ansible or k8 configs comes from embedding config that's not YAML. In these cases you need a path or URI for the processor to resolve before applying, not inverting the entire configuration language to cater to 1 uncommon use case.

The point of my original comment was precisely that SGML was optimized for text documents. I agree that adopting it for configs was a mistake, but the complaint that "IBM lawyer who invented the SGML syntax had never heard of S-expression" doesn't make any sense in that context.

SGML is way shorter than XML.

But as complex as YAML to understand

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