Re: gnome-config problems

[Daniel Barlow <dan telent net>]

On Thu, Jan 29, 1998 at 04:44:07PM +0100, Hrvoje Niksic wrote:
> No, the redundancy is in <FOO>...</FOO> being longer than (FOO ...)

If I can wade in and add some noise at this point in the discussion:

<FOO><BAR>...</BAR></FOO> doesn't gain you anything over 
(foo (bar ...))  when you're editing or writing a file.  I've lost
count of the number of times I've written something like 
<h1>Bugs in <tt>select<tt></h1> which looks fine until you realise
that the closing TT is missing its /

In fact, if you had to read that sentence twice to see the problem,
that adequately illustrates my second point: it doesn't buy you all
that much when reading it either.  It looks fine and pretty when it's
all indented neatly, but you could do the same just as well with a
lispy syntax.  And if you use the One True Editor it'll even do that
indenting for you automatically (maybe it can do for sgml too, but
does it reliably get it right or is it confusable like the Perl mode
indenting is?).

I'd far rather be able to hit tab on a line and have it indent to the
level of the block it _was_ closing than look at the content of it to
work out which block the author thought it was closing.

While I'm ranting, I'll echo the comments about existing software
which supposedly demonstrates the low cost of parsing sgml: 

(1) I've used libsp.  Lovely software, but having to write the parser
entirely as callbacks which sp will call when it gets to each tag is,
well, gross.  I want something that _I_ can call which returns a tree,
not something that just gives me an opportunity to build a tree.  

(2) Netscape Navigator still doesn't parse omitted </TD> tags
correctly.  No slur on the Netscape people (I know there's at least
one following this list ;-) but if they don't have it right, why
should I expect that any other html parser does more than `ad-hoc'
parsing either?

> What is your point?  SGML is *very* hard to parse correctly.  Scheme
> is trivial in comparison.

Too right.  

-dan