On 28 Jun 2010, at 17:19, hugo rivera wrote:
If you haven't heard of XML yet, you must be living under a rock! -
Programming in the .NET Environment
Taken from the fortunes file. I guess I must be living under a rock,
but I don't know what xml is, or pragmatically, what is it for.
Please, understand that I'm not trying to start a flame war in here,
but I'd really appreciate if someone could explain xml to me. I've
read the wikipedia entry but doesn't help me a lot, and for the first
time in my life I saw some xml code today, in a program that I need to
use and, hopefully, understand.
I know this subject isn't plan 9 related, but 9fans is my best
resource for CS questions.
Okay... here's how I understand XML: It's a format for serialising
hierarchically-structured data with arbitrary metadata.
That's the good part. The bad parts... well, here's two:
XML must be valid. It must be valid because the gods of computing,
when cyberspace was graced with their presence, found validation to be
a good idea as it would quickly tell you if your file would parse
correctly before you fed it into the slow, slow, parser. XML
validation is far slower than parsing, but the gods of computing found
validation to be a good idea, so it must be done.
XML must not contain binary data. All binary data must be uuencoded.
This is because the gods of computing suffered networks which would
pass only textual data. We remember their pain, and worshipfully deny
all means by which binary data may be packed into the same file as
textual without harm.
--
One must always specify what one's computer should do, always, before
even considering what, perhaps, the computer may be able to provide
freely, lest the computer become uppity.
