Re: XML: The good, the bad, and the ugly

From: robert <gnuoytr_at_rcn.com>
Date: 18 Oct 2004 06:42:37 -0700
Message-ID: <da3c2186.0410180542.7e34760a@posting.google.com>

"Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote in message news:<rVIcd.267691$D%.111425_at_attbi_s51>...

> "Christopher Browne" <cbbrowne_at_acm.org> wrote in message news: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...

> 
> Exactly.
> 
> 

> > 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.
>
> I dunno. What was SGML designed for?

IBM training manuals. so there!!!

What design considerations
> changed from SGML to XML?

a bit simplified. but still, Presentation. from XML came (or is coming) XHTML. the weenies, mostly java (who *still* don't understand RDBMS) are trying to turn it into a universal data widget. even storage. the mob may win. usually does. well, unless the Supreme Court was appointed by your Daddy and his Friends.

> 
> 

> > Just so. The APIs to connect to the existing parsers aren't
> > particularly simple...

> 
> The DOM API in Java is one of the worst Java APIs I have ever
> seen. (The only thing worse is the Advanced Imaging API.) It
> doesn't even use Java strings, fer cryin' out loud! JDOM at
> least is a "native Java" API.
> 
> But it's still intrinsically hard to make a good API for it, because
> the underlying abstraction is so poor. Why are there both
> attributes and nested tags? What's this about CDATA? How
> do we negotiate character encoding? Does whitespace matter
> or doesn't it?
> 
> 
> Marshall

Received on Mon Oct 18 2004 - 08:42:37 CDT