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From: "Trickey, Howard W (Howard)" <trickey@lucent.com>
To: "'9fans@cse.psu.edu'" <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: RE: [9fans] don't shoot me
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 11:45:05 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <D691F041928C1049808A0670D2252BE00428B3C8@nj9620exch001u.mh.lucent.com> (raw)

Lucio De Re wrote:
> I like XML as an information exchange language for diverse platforms.
> Being as vast as it is, it no doubt will be abused more often than
> properly employed.  But I am not aware of any preferable alternative
> (ASN.1?).

I agree with this.  ASN.1 is an alternative, but it sucks much worse.

But it is disappointing that the XML spec is so large that you can't just whip up a parser for the whole thing in a few hundred lines. I think there are three reasons for this:

1) it tries to represent two quite different kinds of data: marked up text (like HTML, SGML), and tree-structured data.  The need for the former introduces all sorts of whitespace worries that just muck things up for the latter.
2) 'attributes' are perhaps a convenient shorthand, but could have (and should have, in my opinion) been left out
3) the namespace stuff vastly complicates things for not a lot of gain

- Howard


             reply	other threads:[~2003-07-18 15:45 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 39+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2003-07-18 15:45 Trickey, Howard W (Howard) [this message]
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2003-07-21 15:40 Stephen Parker
     [not found] <1627809308@snellwilcox.com>
2003-07-18 17:00 ` steve.simon
2003-07-18 15:12 pac
2003-07-18 15:17 ` Lucio De Re
2003-07-18 19:15   ` Scott Schwartz
2003-07-18 19:34     ` ron minnich
2003-07-18 20:34       ` Dan Cross
2003-07-18 21:10         ` boyd, rounin
2003-07-18 21:51           ` Skip Tavakkolian
2003-07-18 21:58             ` boyd, rounin
2003-07-21  8:28           ` Douglas A. Gwyn
2003-07-21  8:50             ` boyd, rounin
2003-07-21 15:09             ` Dan Cross
2003-07-18 21:13         ` boyd, rounin
2003-07-18 15:17 ` ron minnich
2003-07-18 15:23 ` Fco.J.Ballesteros
2003-07-18 15:50   ` Dave Lukes
2003-07-18 17:43     ` boyd, rounin
2003-07-19  3:12     ` Geoff Collyer
2003-07-19  3:45       ` Dan Cross
2003-07-19  3:48         ` boyd, rounin
2003-07-19  4:11           ` Dan Cross
2003-07-19  4:15             ` boyd, rounin
2003-07-21  8:28           ` Anthony Mandic
2003-07-21  8:57             ` boyd, rounin
2003-07-19  4:18         ` boyd, rounin
2003-07-19  4:20         ` Geoff Collyer
2003-07-19  4:26           ` boyd, rounin
2003-08-12 16:09       ` jared jennings
2003-07-18 16:55 ` David Presotto
2003-07-18 17:02   ` ron minnich
2003-07-18 18:22     ` Nigel Roles
2003-07-21  8:27     ` Anthony Mandic
2003-07-18 17:10 ` matt
2003-07-19  6:45 ` Taj Khattra
2003-07-19  6:51   ` boyd, rounin
2003-07-19 11:19     ` Bruce Ellis
2003-07-19 11:41       ` boyd, rounin

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