73 karma · joined September 13, 2010
I thought I read somewhere that Jobs specifically asked for this, (mis)remembering having seen it at PARC, but I cannot find the quote at the moment.
[0] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
There are also errors and approximations: XML did not introduce the bracket syntax, it inherited it from SGML. A DTD is not a schema (and if you want to criticize XML, you should point out that it should not have inherited DTDs from SGML.) He doesn't even mention the worst part about comments, which is that you can't have -- inside a comment (very annoying when commenting a large block of data...)
XML has many beautiful applications, like SVG, SMIL (which never took off but keeps getting rediscovered/reimplemented in an inconsistent manner [full disclosure: I participated in the SMIL and CDF W3C working groups]), XSLT, &c. XHTML was not perfect by a long stretch but the new HTML5 syntax is much, much worse.
Use XML, JSON, and whatever is necessary to get the job done. For the project that I am working on right now, I am using XML for serializing Web app descriptions; in this situation, XML is clearly better than JSON.
EDIT: Additionally, it would be nice to have a short description with screenshots of what it is supposed in the case that you cannot get through the location stage...
Sure seems like an interesting contest this year even though I didn't people still cared about Magic: the Gathering.
And what's up with the green-on-black Mac screen?!
EDIT: my solutions (using Node.js) https://github.com/julienq/incubator/tree/master/misc/readyf...
Bear in mind that it's still a work in progress. Look for "populus.object", especially create(), is_a() and call_super(). There is still something called $new (not new because some picky parsers don't like it) but it's just the chaining of create() (a wrapper around Object.create()) and init().