I don’t hate XML as much as the rest of the world.

one time I was working on a personal text animation library in Godot and I wanted to drive it with text

I needed some way to mark that certain text had different properties, like, some text might move quickly, or slowly, or be bouncy, or have a rainbow effect applied to it

and I was like “I wish there were some way to create a markup language for this”

some kind of markup language that I could extend with my own parts

XML isn’t great as a universal data serialization format, and it’s definitely quite bad as a programming language, but you know, as an extensible markup language it’s got legs

i wonder if the people who designed it knew

(ed: this is a repost of essentially exactly what I wrote the first time I discovered this)

When I’m looking at the problem, specifically, of scripting video-game style dialogue, the thing I’m looking to work with is a language that allows me to mark up text.

In fact, if I could mark up the text in a way that’s extensible - with all of my weird text animations and sound effects and mood modifiers and special effects - that’d be great.

None of these formats seem to do the trick YAML isn’t really a markup language at all, it’s an object serialization language, same with JSON.

Why, this calls for an… extensible markup language.

I wish someone had made something like that.