Better Than XML: Towards a Lexicographic Markup Language

This article takes a critical look at how XML is used in lexicography and asks the question, why do dictionary entries often end up looking so complex when encoded in XML? The main reason for the perceived complexity of XML-encoded dictionaries is purely structural markup: XML elements which contain other XML elements instead of human-readable text. The over-abundance of purely structural markup in lexicography is caused by the nature of lexicographic content, much of which is inherently headed. XML has no support for headedness and neither do other commonly used languages such as JSON and YAML. In this article we propose a number of constraints and extensions to XML, JSON and YAML which add support for headedness into these languages.