StackOverflow2013

Note that there are some explanatory texts on larger screens.

plurals

PO
text
Body
copied!<p>I think the magic word in the question is "declarative."</p> <p>A declarative technology with any flexibility requires a format for declarations. It has to have a way of validating that the declarations are syntactically correct. It needs to be able to serialize and deserialize the underlying data structures into and out of this format. It's very beneficial if the format is sufficiently open that it's straightforward to build tools that generate, modify, or process the declarations.</p> <p>You can see where this is going.</p> <p>I think the problems you're seeing are real, but I don't think they're really XML problems. Well, not directly. I think the real problem lies with the other thing you said: the design tools for these declarative technologies aren't powerful enough.</p> <p>And here's why it is, kind of, an XML problem: no developer who was using JSON as his product's serialization format would allow himself to think "hey, I don't need to implement this feature, the user can just edit the JSON." </p> <p>I think <em>that's</em> the problem right there. It's not that XML's a bad format for representing declarations. It's that XML's openness is very seductive. It gives tool developers a way to skate by on leaving functionality out of their tools.</p> <p>I think that's a social problem, not a technical problem. And it's a tough problem. We'd probably have much better WPF tools if instead of XAML Microsoft had come up with a closed format. But we get too much from open formats to give them up.</p>

Querying!

Guidance

An individual column

Larger individual text columns get their own page to allow for proper reading.

SQuiL has stopped working due to an internal error.

If you are curious you may find further information in the browser console, which is accessible through the devtools (F12).

Reload