I think rants like these makes us more stupid. It turns a discussion about pros and cons of various technologies into pissing matches. His colorful metaphors does not actually illuminate the issue at hand, but only serves to set up "studid" versus "smart" and appeals to emotion by hoping to convince the reader to the side of the smart ones, without actually arguing the specific points of the thechnology. (E.g. why is backslash obviously better than ampersand-semicolon as character escapes? If he have a valid argument for this he certainly does't feel the need to disclose the reason for the reader. He would rather make an elaborate infantilization analogy about breasts.)
I guess this kind of rant appeals to people who have a deep need to feel as part of small elite surrounded by a sea of stupidity, but doesn't have the capacity to understant how different tools may have various pros and cons in different specific situations.
>His colorful metaphors does not actually illuminate the issue at hand
I think quite the opposite, he makes a very compelling case, and even gets into the details. Even in the part you mention, for example you missed some stuff that answers your question (without hand-holding):
= = =
Then, remove the obnoxious character entities and escape special characters with _a single character_, like \, and _name other entities with letters following the same character_. If you need a rich set of publishing symbols, _discover Unicode_.
= = =
>I guess this kind of rant appeals to people who have a deep need feel as part of small elite surrounded by a sea of stupidity, but doesn't have the capacity to understant how different tools have pros and cons in specific situations.
It's not about "different tools have pros and cons in specific situations", it's about how some tools have defects that make them bad for EVERY SINGLE situation. CORBA comes to mind as another example.
It's not that something XML-like cannot be good for certain situations.
It's rather that XML as-it-was-designed has several flaws that don't NEED to be there, and don't benefit ANY use case.
For example, goto has some use cases in C that it is good for. NULL terminated strings on the other hand are a bad idea, and have no place anywhere.
> he makes a very compelling case, and even gets into the details
He always made a compelling case, I would go so far as to say that he was almost always right. The problem with this style of communication is that it hardens people's positions, because the criticism of the position comes wrapped up with the implication that anyone who holds it must be an asshole. That makes it much more difficult for most people to approach the question from a purely technical perspective.
The parts you quoted between === from the article aren't at all a compelling case to me, that's nothing more than a prescription. If he has some argument here, he needs to make it.
It is not "making a case" to state that character entities are "obnoxious" and backslash should be used instead of ampersand. It is stating a preference without providing any kind of justification.
And what do you suggest is the meaning of "discover Unicode" in the context of a criticism of XML? XML was unicode from the beginning.
I guess this kind of rant appeals to people who have a deep need to feel as part of small elite surrounded by a sea of stupidity, but doesn't have the capacity to understant how different tools may have various pros and cons in different specific situations.