Michael G Schwern <schw...@pobox.com> writes:
> Daniel Pittman wrote:
>
>> One of us must be. Perhaps it was my sarcasm, perhaps I completely
>> misunderstood your point. To help clear this up:
>>
>> There is no difference in the information conveyed using a child tag or
>> an attribute of a tag.
>>
>> The only difference between the two, in SGML, is that attributes have
>> less rules applied. They can, and often are, more informal.
>
> And that the attribute form is a hell of a lot more compact and easier
> to eyeball. Sometimes humans have to read and write this crap, ya
> know?
Oh, believe me, I *KNOW* that. Having to deal with more and more XML
crap at the protocol level has really driven that home.
Why, yes, EPP, I /am/ looking at you. Felching miserable half-caste
screwed up abortion of a protocol.
I mean, seriously. You want XML for data exchange, fine. Use it. It
is a terrible choice but, hey, you wrote these rules and it is better
than making up a standard. (Well, probably.)
But, hey, that wasn't enough was it? OH, no. We need to be special and
we want to send multiple XML messages over a single TCP connection.
Well, then, what should we do? Why, add a 32bit binary number before
each XML message to give the length, adding binary framing to an
otherwise text only protocol.
Yes! Brilliant! Because XML isn't, you know, self-framing or
anything. Especially good because binary data is efficient so we don't
waste any bytes sending an ASCII or line oriented size field either.
That saves bandwidth for when we are transmitting the human formatted,
filled with insignificant whitespace XML data around!
Anyway, if you rely on the self framing aspect of it you could end up in
all sorts of trouble. Why, when TCP drops data bytes at random (as it
is so prone to doing) you could end up missing the end of a frame and
getting out of sync! Disaster!
> As insane as it is that anyone would pick XML as a human data format.
> I'm looking at YOU Ant!
Y hullo thar! Ant! Java! If you wanted to ask how XML could be made
worse the answer lies in there somewhere. Oh, yes.
I have avoided working with Ant so for because, frankly, if I am ever
fored to use it I probably /will/ buy a plane ticket, fly to the US and
stab James Gosling in the head with a spoon while screaming
"You worked with Lisp and Scheme! You know what a good mechanism
for expressing syntax is! How! Could! You! Do! This! To! Us!"
...and, you know, that whole frothing at the mouth thing is a fashion
disaster. People would talk.
[...]
> Oh GOD! I'm supposed to read that?! And write it?! Willingly?! It
> makes make look positively beautiful.
Ah, but at least it is all case sensitive so the CPU doesn't have to
work so hard to read it. Much better than those nasty SGML
applications.
Daniel
--
X Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of
political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain
greed. X Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money.
-- The Unix Haters Handbook
