Now there's a subject line to wake up to in the morning! :)
Andy Chambers wrote:
Hey Kenny,
Here's an aspect of cells that I haven't seen highlighted before.
The html macros I made pretty much constitute a schema for html. Not only does it concisely say what attributes are allowed on each element, but it gives you the object model for dealing with instances of these elements, and a nice set of macros for easily creating them.
A couple of "validation" defmethods and I think we've got something that may be better even than relax-ng (the unstated assumption here is that its not hard to be better than xml schema).
I took a look at relax-ng. Pretty scary. And fascinating, that XML has conditioned them such that relax-ng is considered concise. :) No Real Lisper would look at that stuff for more than two seconds before dashing off some macrology.
I know that lispers generally aren't that fond of xml but I bet there are a few that use it on their day job (as someone who's day job involves dealing with CDISC's various models it certainly is important for me).
Ah, CDISC! I guess you saw my blog entry on that clinical trial management software I did in Lisp. Too bad we could not sell it.
Yes, Lispers do a lot of this stuff. I appreciate the kind words on Cells, but I think in this case the credit goes to lisp and macrology -- I think whenever a Lisper wraps X they do not just wrap it, they also add value by making X easier to generate and harder to get wrong.
If you look at cl-opengl they went too far, IMHO, but it gives an idea anyway of the Lisp ethic: Don't Just Wrap!
Since you're using your blog as a lisp/cells advocacy platform, maybe you could demonstrate this by creating a few macros that do a similar thing for RSS.
That's Interwebby stuff, right? :)
I am going to see if I can get Hunchentoot built -- think we'll have something for me to show to ECLM 2008?
kenny