So What's So Hard About Parsing? The Case for Humans

The success of XML is partly thanks to the success of HTML. HTML was designed for people to author by hand, which was one of the factors that contributed to its success. However XML-based markup languages are not in general designed for ease of authoring, and this is only compounded by the ability to combine markup languages in a single document.

A major strength of XML is interoperability: the ability to transfer documents between processors. But that interoperability is at the cost of readability: XML documents basically describe the parse tree of the underlying document in a form that is easy to parse for a computer, but difficult to read by a person.

However, parsing is not difficult, nor in general processor-time consuming.

This paper describes a generic technique for allowing human-readable textual documents to be included in the XML process, retaining the interoperability, while improving authorability and readability, by describing in the grammar for the textual document the method of representing the parse tree as XML.