Stewart Stremler wrote:
begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Fri, Jul 06, 2007 at 05:17:23PM -0700:
I don't know why everybody complains about XML.
'Cuz it sucks to work with XML. You need pretty-printers and custom
editors and days of trying to figure out what the hell has gone wrong
with the configuration since the parser now chokes and dies with
"Parse Error, line 3". . .
Huh? Emacs works for me just fine. That's the whole point of using XML
in this instance. Emacs handles the tagging and editing without needing
some bizarre custom editor.
Doesn't vi handle xml?
You suck the whole tree into memory. You walk the tree. Done.
You suck the whole tree into memory. You loop through an array of
XPATH expressions, and store the result in a map. Done. You're right.
It isn't that hard.
Uh, what's this XPATH crap? You pull the tree directly into a series of
hierarchical maps directly.
It's not the programmatic side of things that's annoying (well, it is,
but that's because XML parsing libraries are not nice in C, C++, Java,
and so forth -- and picking a language based on XML support seems
backwards),
Well, the problem with C and C++ is serialization. You effectively have
to reduce everything to strings and then laboriously transform things
into integers, floats, etc.
I don't understand why Java has such crappy XML API's, though. It
doesn't have the static limitations that C and C++ do.
Just because *you* don't look at configuration files doesn't mean that
*I* should suffer when I go and I look at 'em. The file format on the
disk should /first/ be for humans. SGML and children ain't for humans.
By that logic, we should be using English. Uh, pass.
We make some concessions so that computers can cope. The moment you
need quoting and nesting, you have something like XML. You might as
well start with it.
-a
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