YAML, meet SOX

ziggy on 2002-03-30T18:33:17

Sox is an alternative syntax for XML. It looks like a more XMLish, more Pythonic version of YAML.

Perhaps XML isn't the universal syntax after all.

• there is an obscure, experimental syntaxes that maps directly to XSLT
• RELAX NG has an official non-XML syntax in development
• RDF has Notation3
• RFC 822 isn't going away anytime soon
• WML has a "compiled" syntax
• YAML (and now SOX) are interesting experiments to encode hierarchies without XML tagging

Maybe XML's role in the world is to filter out the needless discussion of syntax when working on more interesting problems: SVG, SOAP, WebDAV, SMIL, ...

The classic argument for XML is to replace all of the multiflavored text files in /etc with various different, "intuitive" XML vocabularies. That idea is such a non-starter it's not funny. Perhaps what's necessary is a single, unified syntax for all of those files -- something that is most emphatically not XML, but brings some of the expected benefits in a more user (er, sysadmin) friendly manner.