Jason Williams wrote: > Do you really want to > hand your customer some proprietary scheme for how to parse your syntax so > they can import your data? Or would you rather hand them a DTD and let them > use off the shelf parsers and editors?
word. text files will always be with us. so what? but do we want to go back to having some homebrew bbs protocol for every app? i don't think so, nak, nak, nak. the purpose of xml isn't human readability. the purpose is some degree of machine -utility- where we don't have to reinvent the wheel every other week. xml tastes good. -some- degree of human readability is just a nice side effect of xml. the tools don't always live up. but as someone who just wrote a parser for some olap data of undocumented format, i'd much rather struggle with the tools -once- than beat my head against the wall -everytime- just to get to the point where i've got some data i can -begin- to work with. and what wesley said about nesting and what thi said about validation, too. with those i might not have had to worry about so much ill-behaved data relations on my last project, which was the bulk of the code, time, and money spent. xml doesn't just offer a standard. it also offers something with some well tested rationale behind it. here's a recent differing view from someone with far more credibility than me, though: http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/03/16/XML-Prog but here's a bunch of responses that do a lot of damage to his view: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/03/19/deviant.html sincerely, chris calloway _______________________________________________ Juglist mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://trijug.org/mailman/listinfo/juglist_trijug.org
