On Fri, Sep 27, 2019 at 9:47 AM Lassi Kortela <xxxxxx@lassi.io> wrote:

In other words, basically the entire world. The lesson is not to make
things difficult unless you like obscurity.

In that case, what are you doing with Scheme?  :-)  And PHP may be popular, but it's also grotesquely unmaintainable.  The "HTML paradise" was good for authors but nobody else: browsers, HTML analyzers, and the various other tools a good format should have became impossibly difficult to write (unless you are a Google or an Apple, as I said).   As the author of a tool to reliably convert arbitrary HTML to XML events or text <http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/tagsoup/>, I know that.  (This was before HTML 5, which is at least a standard, even if a very hairy one and written in a style that makes ISO standards look simple:  you could very nearly write a program to convert the HTML5 documents into an HTML browser.)
 
This discussion has diverged quite a bit from the technical details of
our encodings. In practice, any binary format we'll come up with from
our current understanding and opinions is going to be reasonable from
the point-of-view of easy implementation and interoperability. We'll
probably make a reasonable text format, too, judging by the way it's
going. But there we have to be careful.

+1



John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        xxxxxx@ccil.org
Cash registers don't really add and subtract;
        they only grind their gears.
But then they don't really grind their gears, either;
        they only obey the laws of physics.  --Unknown