From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: From: "Trickey, Howard W (Howard)" To: "'9fans@cse.psu.edu'" <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: RE: [9fans] don't shoot me MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 11:45:05 -0400 Topicbox-Message-UUID: fb0a6228-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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