How to Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML (2005)

Re:How to Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML (2005) by mbrock on Monday August 01, 2016 @03:55AM (#12200801)

I like S-expressions too, especially when generating markup programmatically. For hand-writing HTML/XML documents, which I do quite a lot, I really enjoy the tag style because of the verbose end tags and the ease of moving blocks. It's at least nice enough to make me annoyed when people claim the tag syntax is some horrible stupid disaster compared to S-expressions or (worse) JSON.

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Re:How to Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML (2005) by wtbob on Monday August 01, 2016 @04:39AM (#12200932)

> For hand-writing HTML/XML documents, which I do quite a lot, I really enjoy the tag style because of the verbose end tags and the ease of moving blocks.

I can't say anything about liking verbose tags, which seems to me a matter of taste, but moving around S-expression blocks is easy: C-SPC to set the point, M-C-f to move forward one S-expression, C-w to cut the current region, navigate to where one wants it, C-y to yank the cut region.

Granted, this is using emacs, which really had better have good S-expression-editing capabilities after 40 years!

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Re:How to Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML (2005) by mbrock on Monday August 01, 2016 @07:07AM (#12201486)

I also quite like Dylan's way of ending blocks, letting you type for example "end method do-stuff" so you can see clearly what's being ended, which is useful in a document with long sections.

And I like that XML block moving is even manageable with ed, which I actually use sometimes. Well, and vi.

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