[zackbrown]

Point taken! And yes, especially for developers (our core target demographic,) you are right that hand-writing should account for >5% of code volume.

Syntax is fairly contentious. "One man's trash is another man's treasure," on your note of "old garbage." It's hard to please everyone, however:

We could offer syntax "skins," since the data storage mechanism is a layer separated from the AST (thus different ASTs/syntaxes could de/serialize from the same persisted data.) So folks who want closing tags can have them; folks who want a YAML-like format could have it; folks who want a KDL-like language could have it.

At the language level, Pax's distinguishing characteristic is that it's the union of an expression language and a markup language; this is the reason we couldn't use an off the shelf markup language / parser. But again, KDL or YAML could be extended with PAXEL to make pax-kdl and pax-yaml flavors alongside pax-xml.

We had to start somewhere, and starting as close as possible to the markup lingua franca (HTML) made sense to us. It'd be a dream for Pax to be loved / adopted enough that we or anyone else cares to make a syntax skin.

[eviks]

syntax flavours / "skins" sounds like a great idea if Pax isn't so tightly coupled with the current one

(HTML makes sense as the target to start with, but I'm not sure most people "speak" raw HTML, they'd design apps/pages in other languages)