I read "Stamp on the ants ", which lead me to write "XML - One Ring to Rule them All... " because I'd seem some remarkably lame justification for XML. I saw an interesting response in "XML is first class, scripting languages are second class ".

At this point, we have an interesting tangential …

I harp on Design Goal 6 in the XML 1.0 Standard , "XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear". In Kontrawize, the response is XML editors help meet this design goal. "There are plenty of good XML-aware editors around, some of which are free." While true, I think this …

The XML folks seem to have a number of points:

• Ant already works. Complexity be damned.
• XML is fine for everything that's not Java. Except SQL. And CSS.
• Ant is "already" part of the technology stack, and it uses XML. Anything better isn't already there.
• Everyone already knows XML. They …

Kontrawize author Anthony Coates warns that this is an attractive time sink. Thanks for the heads up.

My first round of research found HTML Slidy , but didn't find DocUtils + S5 . S5 is simpler and does less than Slidy. RST markup is far easier to cope with than HTML. This looks …

PPT has one big advantage: it is written by the same people who wrote Windows. So it can seize the Windows display and keyboard, and take control over the entire UI. I happen to think that's A Bad Thing™ but I may be in the minority on that.

Of course …

I've been using the Apache FOP http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/ to transform XSL:FO into PDF's. FOP works well enough for some DocBook processing, but it can't handle really complex stuff gracefully.

Can we also use this XSL:FO technology for producing PDF form letters as part of a …

The most common argument for introducing YAPL goes like this:

"There are way too many programming languages out there. And they are each flawed in some way (small and odd, or large and incomprehensible). So I, in my wisdom and will create YAPL, which will displace all these other, inferior …

The idea of "universal" processing via XSLT is moderately appealing. There's a big issue with poorly defined semantics, which always breaks a meta-data driven approache. The holy grail is perfect metadata from which all application software can be derived in a trivial way. I'm not sure this is ever achievable …

From an email I got recently, lightly edited. Responses to follow