He's arguing against "use the best general-purpose format for everything", and in favour of "use a suitable special-purpose format for the job at hand, like XML for marked-up text".Today I observe empirically that people who write markup languages like having elements and attributes, and I feel nervous about telling people what they should and shouldn't like. Also, I have one argument by example that I think is incredibly powerful, a show-stopper:
<a href="http://www.w3.org/">the W3C</a>
This just seems like an elegantly simple and expressive way to encode an anchored one-way hyperlink, and I would resent any syntax that forced me to write it differently.
Labels: technical