GeneThomas

Thanks.

The linked document justifies all design decisions.

Please try to make valid criticism.

They are for less than and greater than in mathematics!? They are good in markup for a number of reasons including that they stand out.

I believe it is readable, what else could that mean but a Book object with the given name, the author details and an array of three one-line reviews.

  <Book>
      <Name=A Plan>
      <Author>
          <Name=Eric Harrison>
          <Mobile=+64 24 240 990>
      <$>
      <<Reviews>
          Fascinating.
      <&>
          Of interest.
      <&>
          Worth reading.
      <$>>
  <$>

> * Native support for arrays. I mentioned a few above. `<<Faults$$>>` and `<<$$>>` -- guess what these two mean if you see this first time? You would never guess. It's an empty array and an empty element, you've just failed.

<< means it relates to starting an array, $>> means it is the end, $$ meaning something else — an empty array!

The xᴍʟ alternative is a bodge:

    public class PurchaseOrder
    {
        public Item[] ItemsOrders;
    }

    public class Item
    {
        public string ItemID;
        public decimal ItemPrice;
    }

serializes to:

    <PurchaseOrder>
        <ItemsOrders>
            <Item>
                <ItemID>aaa111</ItemID>
                <ItemPrice>34.22</ItemPrice>
            </Item>
            <Item>
                <ItemID>bbb222</ItemID>
                <ItemPrice>2.89</ItemPrice>
            </Item> 
        </ItemsOrders>
    </PurchaseOrder>

Where the array is marked up as two sub elements both called <Item>:

Xᴇɴᴏɴ has first class support for arrays:

  <PurchaseOrder>
      <<ItemsOrders>
          <ItemID=aaa111>
          <ItemPrice=34.22>
      <&>
          <ItemID=bbb222>
          <ItemPrice=2.89>
      <$>>
  <$>

The elements may be scalars so

  <PurchaseOrder>
      <<ItemsOrders>
      <$>>
  <$>

has an array with one item of the empty string. So a separate syntax for empty arrays is required!

  <PurchaseOrder>
      <<ItemsOrders$$>>
  <$>

I emboldened the <code> blocks a little. Looks good on Chrome on iPhone but not Edge nor Safari. :o|

Thanks.

> I guess Xenon is designed to be not comfortable for the vast majority of people including me then?

You seem fairly comfortable with the rest of English. Korean numbers do not seem to scale well.

> allow `$` or not requires a single example

Java allows $ in identifiers.

The point is one can apply the xᴇɴᴏɴ library to arbitrary data and generate representative markup. For “Egyptian hieroglyphs not encoded in Unicode” 𓀠 one can write plug-ins.

There is the concept of “well formed xᴇɴᴏɴ” as outputted by the ᴅᴏᴍ and serializer which is deterministic as will suffice for canonicalization.

Specific points would be a contribution to the discussion.

The charset is not published, when it does eventuate byte order marks safeguard the interpretation of documents.