The FtanML Markup Language

This paper presents a new markup language called FtanML, together with an associated schema language called FtanGram, and a query/transformation language called FtanSkrit. FtanML was originally designed by a group of students taught by the author, together with Stephanie Haupt, at a summer school held in the Swiss village of Ftan in August 2012. It has since been taken forward by the author with some further involvement by the students. The idea of FtanML is to rethink markup from the ground up: to imagine what the world could be like if we didn't have to carry forward the mistakes of the past; to take what works well in current languages, and discard the features that do little more than add complexity. More mundanely, FtanML can be seen as a blend of ideas from XML and JSON: neither the union nor the intersection of the two, but a new language that combines the best features of both.