Jeff Atwood on ‘XML: The Angle Bracket Tax‘ (via Yangman).

David Ascher asks: JSON or XML for distributable Thunderbird configuration files? Both XML and JSON have weaknesses. I wonder if SQLite + a lightweight XUL editor would be better?

Which is better, XML or Python for Python templates? I like the Php approach myself (intermixed language/template), as it matches the natural state of each language. The linked debate is interesting, but what I really like is the side-by-side format¹.

1. The “log in to vote” overlay is a bit confusing/noisy, however ↩

A large index of user-rated comics, and its feed.

Erik Naggum intelligently rants about the weaknesses in XML. He says:

XML, being the single suckiest syntactic invention in the history of mankind, offers you several layers at which you can do exactly the same thing very differently, in fact so differently that it takes effort to see that they are even related.

Here’s a plugin to automatically close XML/HTML tags in Vim, and some general Vim HTML/XML tools and mappings.

Charles Petzold writes about a C# Application Markup Language specification. XML is just so great.

These are my picks for the best base Javascript libraries:

• moo.ajax, a miniscule wrapper for asynchronous XMLHttp requests
• moo.fx, a itty-bitty browser fx lib
• The Yahoo UI library, a larger, but very complete set of tools
• The prototype.js framework (it’s really an Ajax class library) and its wiki
• The rico javascript effects library
• The sajax simple Ajax library
• The Behaviour DOM access library
• And lastly, the defacto script.aculo.us libraries
• And if the above is geek to you, try this ‘Ajax’ overview at the Ajaxian blog, or the Wikipedia article on Ajax (programming)

Why Shouldn’t Authors Self-Publish?

XMLHttpRequest Guidelines, a set of sensible limits for using this handy-dandy API.