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Comment by batista | Hacker News Reader

Especially the part around 2/3rds of the text, about how to improve XML.

Also loved the jokes and metaphors. We need such people in tech discussions, most community leaders have turned teletubbies-nice to each other, to the detriment not only of a good flame-fight, but of the actual dismissal of brain dead ideas.

Instead of violently ridiculing proponents of bad ideas/software/etc to shame and (hopefully) sepuku, we tip-toe around them, or at best, just make light fun of them, like in the "Mongo is webscale" video.

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I think rants like these makes us more stupid. It turns a discussion about pros and cons of various technologies into pissing matches. His colorful metaphors does not actually illuminate the issue at hand, but only serves to set up "studid" versus "smart" and appeals to emotion by hoping to convince the reader to the side of the smart ones, without actually arguing the specific points of the thechnology. (E.g. why is backslash obviously better than ampersand-semicolon as character escapes? If he have a valid argument for this he certainly does't feel the need to disclose the reason for the reader. He would rather make an elaborate infantilization analogy about breasts.)

I guess this kind of rant appeals to people who have a deep need to feel as part of small elite surrounded by a sea of stupidity, but doesn't have the capacity to understant how different tools may have various pros and cons in different specific situations.

>His colorful metaphors does not actually illuminate the issue at hand

I think quite the opposite, he makes a very compelling case, and even gets into the details. Even in the part you mention, for example you missed some stuff that answers your question (without hand-holding):

= = = Then, remove the obnoxious character entities and escape special characters with _a single character_, like \, and _name other entities with letters following the same character_. If you need a rich set of publishing symbols, _discover Unicode_. = = =

>I guess this kind of rant appeals to people who have a deep need feel as part of small elite surrounded by a sea of stupidity, but doesn't have the capacity to understant how different tools have pros and cons in specific situations.

It's not about "different tools have pros and cons in specific situations", it's about how some tools have defects that make them bad for EVERY SINGLE situation. CORBA comes to mind as another example.

It's not that something XML-like cannot be good for certain situations.

It's rather that XML as-it-was-designed has several flaws that don't NEED to be there, and don't benefit ANY use case.

For example, goto has some use cases in C that it is good for. NULL terminated strings on the other hand are a bad idea, and have no place anywhere.

The parts you quoted between === from the article aren't at all a compelling case to me, that's nothing more than a prescription. If he has some argument here, he needs to make it.

Your use of capitalization reflects your emotional state of mind on the topic.

@jebblue

>Your use of capitalization reflects your emotional state of mind on the topic.

No, my use of capitalization reflects my frustration with being unable to bold words for emphasis.

Your use of psychobabble on the other hand reflects a lot more on your cultural background.

  > he makes a very compelling case, and even gets into the details

He always made a compelling case, I would go so far as to say that he was almost always right. The problem with this style of communication is that it hardens people's positions, because the criticism of the position comes wrapped up with the implication that anyone who holds it must be an asshole. That makes it much more difficult for most people to approach the question from a purely technical perspective.

It is not "making a case" to state that character entities are "obnoxious" and backslash should be used instead of ampersand. It is stating a preference without providing any kind of justification.

And what do you suggest is the meaning of "discover Unicode" in the context of a criticism of XML? XML was unicode from the beginning.

Also loved the jokes and metaphors.

I did not: He tried to be clever, but only succeeded in looking like an asshole.

The technical criticism may have merit, the presentation leaves a lot to be desired.

We need such people in tech discussions

I don't. Thankfully, it's easy to ignore people on the internet.

I agree with you, and don't mind someone being blunt when they believe they're right and mainstream views are wrong, even when I disagree with the argument the person is making.

It often seems to result in a strong reaction in the opposite direction, however. I was amused when I read Ted Dziuba's "Node.js is Cancer" rant, and was able to separate the technical arguments from the invective and evaluate them on their merit. A lot of people, though, seemed to respond angrily with indignant forum or blog posts. So I suppose there's always the danger that being too blunt will result in your real message being lost in the resulting firestorm.

Dziuba's post has ended up the 3rd result on Google for node.js. Mission accomplished, I'm sure!

My favorite:

  Remove the syntactic mess that is attributes.

One of the many reasons I love json.

XML and HTML are derivatives of SGML.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML#Sources http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html

I can't imagine HTML without attributes:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/index/attributes.html

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