Re: XML: The good, the bad, and the ugly
Date: 18 Oct 2004 02:01:51 GMT
Message-ID: <2tgmgeF1v44fjU1_at_uni-berlin.de>
"Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote:
>> XML, it seems to me, is a format designed for general data transfer.
>
> It's a format designed to markup text with presentation, which
> is part of why it's so *bad* for general data transfer.
It's a recreation of Lisp s-expressions produced by people that got there by hacking on SGML who, as likely as not, didn't know they'd get s-exprs, and wound up with something less good...
It's NOT for "marking up text with presentation;" the creators certainly _did_ know that what they were doing was to create a way of structuring data that _wasn't_ about presentation.
>> It is a Jack of All Trades.
>
> Yes, it's bad at everything (except possibly marking up text with
> presentation.)
Yeah, I'd say it's good for that.
>> It is strong at providing data in a standard format readable by a
>> wide variety of different systems.
>
> It's no better at this than any other format. Just because many
> computers already have 500k XML parsers installed doesn't mean the
> format is easy to parse.
Just so. The APIs to connect to the existing parsers aren't particularly simple...
-- output = ("cbbrowne" "_at_" "acm.org") http://linuxfinances.info/info/rdbms.html Signs of a Klingon Programmer #9: "Indentation?! -- I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull!"Received on Mon Oct 18 2004 - 04:01:51 CEST