Comment by conartist6

As to the simplicity of the syntax I think you would understand what I mean if you were writing a parser.

It's particularly gratifying that you can easily interpret CSTML with a stream parser. XML cannot work this way because this particular case is ambiguous:

  <Name

What does Name mean in this fragment of syntax? Is it the name of a namespace? Or the name of a node? We won't know until we look forward and see if the next character is :

That's why we write `<Namespace:Name />` as `:Namespace: <Name />` - it means there's no point in the left-to-right parse at which the meaning is ambiguous. And finally CSTML has no entity lookups so there's no need to download a DTD to parse it correctly.