Tonight, I couldn't sleep so I snapped together Medusa and Cheetah.  Medusa is a fast low footprint embeddable web server written in Python.  Cheetah is general template engine, also written in Python.  Together, they are a lean and mean pair.  Cool.

Tanga looks similar to what I proposed in my SML post.

Paul Tchistopolskii is maintaining a list of XML Alternatives  and he has added to the list a link to my SML post.  Thanks Paul.  Paul is a well known XML expert who contributes constantly to the XML community.

"Dave" posted a brief comment about my SML post within 1 minute of posting it.  Wow!

Don Park is working on a new language that does some of what XML does, but is as simple as can be. 

SML is meant to be an alternate meatspace-friendly syntax for XML infoset.  So I am hoping to make it do everything XML does except cause wrinkles and hairloss.  Ambitious?  Nah.  Actually, I was playing with it as a 'front-end' to an XML viewer/editor.  With it, I am less likely to cringe when I open XML files.

In the last attempt to simplify XML, two key requirements were a) compatibility with XML, and b) minimalization.  This time, I removed the compatibility requirement and shifted to focus to user-friendly syntax: easier to read and write than XML.  First rought cut of the syntax is described informally and in brief below.  Please keep in mind that the syntax is incomplete but presented here to promote discussion and exploration.

New SML (Simple Markup Language) syntax is best described showing how an XML fragment example looks like in SML.

XML Version:

    <circle x="1.0" y="1.0" r="0.5">
        <fill color="#FF0000"/>
        <text>Hello</text>
        <text>World</text>
    </circle>

SML Version:

    circle x="1.0" y="1.0"
            r="0.5"
        fill color="#FF0000"
        text "Hello"
        text
            "World"

Key features are:

1. no brackets around element names.  Instead, indentations are used to encode hierarchy Python-style.
2. one element per line.
3. textual data must be quoted.
4. attributes are double indented.  They may be on the same line as their element for readability.  Structured attribute value may be supported.

[Note: I removed assignable content to avoid some confusions.]

Note that SML can be used just as a visual data format, to interactively read and write XML, and not as an data storage or transport format.  Additional features I am thinking of adding are:

• triple quotes for multi-line textual data
• C-style character escapes using backslash
• # for comments and others (i.e. PI, namespace, aliases, etc.)
• using line-continuation backslash chracter instead of double indent

In their SEC 10-Q filing, Microsoft wrote

To the extent the open source model gains increasing market acceptance, sales of the company's products may decline, the company may have to reduce the prices it charges for its products, and revenues and operating margins may consequently decline

My personal view is that Microsoft is under estimating the threat, not only to itself, but also to the world economy.  Think of open source as a virus that has yet to fully transform itself.  Those who are trying to take advantage of open source movement, companies like IBM and Sun, are riding a tiger, unable to get off and destined to be feed its hunger.  As grassroot organizations, companies, and governments build and add to open source infrastructures, nature of the beast will change, destroying value faster than we can build it.

Open source is not like Pet Rock or Hoola Hoop.  Open source is more like Communism or Fascism in its nature.  Can anyone or anything stop it?  My current view is that only a total wreck of the world economy will stop it because open source is fueled by idealism and subsidies from outside the software industry.

If the reader thinks I am anti-open source, think again.  I like open source and continues to contribute to open source community.  What I am saying is that open source is as dangerous as wildfire and should be treated as such.  While destruction and evolution are often confused in times of fast changes, caution and skepticism may be our guiding light.