voidpointer

I think when arguing about XML, many people forget its relationship to SGML. Many of the drawbacks in XML are design decisions made in order to maintain backwards compatibility with SGML tools that were in use when XML was devised.

In order to simplify parsing (and in order to enable parsing a well formed document without knowing its DTD), XML threw out much of the syntactic sugar that SGML had to offer such as implicitly closed tags. I.e. Many people think that <tr><td>foo<td>bar... is invalid HTML because of missing </td>. In fact, it is perfectly valid because the HTML (SGML-)DTD specifies that a <td>-tag implicitly closes a preceding <td>. Most think it's a browser-hack. It is not.

What both XML (and SGML) add over S-EXPR is support for expressing grammers, a well-defined validation mechanism and quite good support for coping with different character encoding.

Well, it has been pointed out before, but this is just too funny. I hadn't looked at joel's site for some time and I had to check some other posts to tell whether the blurbs under the real posts were there for humorous reasons or whether they were an actual part of the page template. Unfortunately the latter is true. He could just put "Joel loves developers."

What's there sounds like the same kind of marketing department cool-aid that the poor engineers at Sun are forced to put in their installers.

Now, if you are tempted to say something like "the inmates are running the asylum" in Sun's case that may very well be true: http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/santaclara/agn.htm :-)

No. He means that the quality of the books published by O'Reilly is essentially unrelated to the value/truthfulness of the advice that he is giving in the linked article.

It seems almost ironic that an author who sees no value in education beyond securing credentials that get you a good position is only offering anecdotes to back his position.