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Tim Bray On The Origin Of XML

Posted by Zonk on from the makes-feed-users-happy dept.

gManZboy writes "Queue just posted an interview with XML co-inventor Tim Bray (currently at Sun Microsystems). Interestingly enough the interviewer is none other than database pioneer Jim Gray (currently at Microsoft). Among other things, in their discussion Tim reveals where the idea for XML actually came from: Tim's work on the OED at Waterloo."

2 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why, oh why, did they have to repeat the tag na by Alomex · · Score: 5, Insightful

    why the hell does the end tag name have to be repeated?

    Because that is the single biggest source of headaches in parsing SGML, the precursor of XML, in which such a construct is allowed.

    It also makes error recovery very difficult, something that we know is quite important from all that malformed HTML code out there. The XML creators knew that too.

  2. What it should have looked like by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think XML should have looked more like this:

    (html
    (head
    (title "This is an example"))
    (body
    (h1 "A first level header")
    (p "There's no reason for all the extra characters.")
    (p "Although this looks like LISPy HTML it could have all the features of XML")))