Byron Davies wrote in message <·················@pobox.com>...
>P.S. Does anyone else think that XML -- the wave of the future in
>transmitting structured data around the Internet -- is just Lisp with
>angle-brackets instead of parentheses?
Gotta chuckle over that. At an SGML conference a few years ago I got into a
bit of an argument with the CSS gurus from Microsoft and W3C. The Internet
Explorer evangelists from Microsoft were there to publicly jump on the CSS
band-wagon. As I recall this was pre-JScript,
post-getting-their-butts-kicked by Netscape, so they were playing the
standards card.
Anyway I put in a plug for DSSSL as a better candidate language than CSS for
the purposes under discussion, DSSSL being more complete, better designed,
more mature (being an ISO standard etc.). Comparing CSS to DSSSL is hardly
fair, CSS is a weirdly idiosyncratic, purely declarative style sheet
language, while DSSSL is more generally applicable to declaration and
interchange of processing semantics (designed to handle transformation as
well as style/formatting and extensible to other applications). If I'd had
my crystal ball working I'd have mentioned that DSSSL would have been a good
springboard for JavaScript and DOM, but never mind. I did try to press the
point that unlike CSS, DSSSL is a "real language", and oh yeah it's based on
Scheme. At which point the Chief Evangelists from Microsoft and W3C cut me
off, and one of them says something in a snide tone of voice along the lines
of: "Yeah, we considered DSSSL but we decided people don't like LISP because
they don't like to type parentheses". At which point I left the room to
avoid doing myself or others harm.
/kmc