It's entire structure is *derived* from printer tags and most are useless. Apps that don't know what they are sending or receiving shouldn't be doing it in the first place. And in fact they don't. The whole semantic web concept is total BS and is in fact a total failure.

No b2b apps really need it as they are all custom built and the apps cloned from them already know the semantics of the data or they wouldn't have bothered to clone from them in the first place. XML is just added after the fact. It is useless cruft.

Why do you think everyone hates it? It's as bad as C++ which requires full knowledge of the application specific templates to be of any use. Kill them both.

No it is not weird. XML is weird because it contains and is based on printer control cruft. Lots of printer control cruft. An unnecessary tag is a tag is a tag is a fucking tag.

Why do you think everybody hates it? Why do you think there are plans afoot (like the subject of this article) to get by without it?

XML sucks because it is based on a printer control spec. It's as simple and as ugly as that.

Yes. I'm lucky LISP can parse XML since they are really only just a special case of S-Expressions. Once out of that horrid mess of printer tags it was much more straightforward to validate them and insert them in all their complexity into a nicely normalized relational database.

Really. Non of that totally unnecessary tag BS inherited from a printer definition spec (of all absurd things.) And key/value pairs are a hell of a lot easier to insert into a database in addition to being easier to read.

for clearing that up for us.

You actually prefer XML???????

People have plenty of guns that the government doesn't know about as they were inherited or obtained through private sales.

Well I'm a sailor and as far as I'm concerned it was a chain or continuous line of payments so I don't feel at all wrong in using that spelling.

Go get thee bent.

Perl may be more powerful (I myself wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole) but bash and Perl are both still imperative programming languages.

  I prefer Newlisp myself for most tasks as it can natively access system calls including , Java graphics, interface natively with MtSQL and SQLite and also with most other databases via ODBC, and and with C/C++ libraries in addition to modifying itself on the fly as all good interpreters can do. Supports regexprs too. Perl sucks balls in comparison. Its very handy for HTML and XML since they are just S-expressions when you get right down to it. It has built in httpd too.

Get hip and use Newlisp for any server side task imaginable.

A shell can read data and process it with its own built-in commands. Reading in integers and adding them up to a total and outputting the result is a trivial example of this. You can do it in C and you can do it in bash. They are functionally equivalent in this way since they both have arithmetic operators. Shells have built-in comparison operators and can also branch. This makes them imperative programming languages in the same way that C or Fortran or assembly language are.

Your hard and fast distinction about "targets" makes no sense whatsoever.

At least they reference something. See my previous comment about your last two.

You use non-standard terminology that makes no sense to me. They "target" the OS with system calls and also access and process foreign data through I/O, and invoke and interface with other programs, and also do their own processing.

Then why is bash and other shells almost universally referred to as "scripting" languages?

Non sequitur.

I didn't say that I was good, just that I was well payed. There *IS* a difference you know.