On Tue, 11 Jun 2002, Ward Vuillemot wrote: > I know we are straying WOT, but I would love to get a better feel for > XML, XSLT and AxKit. There are a lot of different systems out there. . > .and part of me wants to just do it my way (in large part to learn), but > I also realize that I really want to get to the business of also being > productive. > > Per the below, I would imagine some would say XML in and of itself is > not worth considering as a contender for being the basis for our C of > MVC. AxKit bills itself as an XML application. Would ppl suggest just > using an XSLT parser. . .or is it worth looking at AxKit. > > If anyone is willing to share their experiences, knowledge, insight -- > off the ML is okay, too -- I would _really_ appreciate it!
A while ago (couple of months I think) on the AxKit-Dahut IRC channel Eric Cholet was raving about how he had discovered how cool XML was. What really happened was that Eric discovered that XML isn't about the Syntax, which seems to be what everybody focuses on (especially perl people I find). The beauty of XML is in the tools. Things like SAX, which allow you to build a pipeline of specialised tools for munging data, are really why XML is so great. I really can't put it as well as Eric did at the time. I only hope by using his name out loud here I can prompt him to post something ;-) Basically I would just suggest that the set of tools for manipulating XML are better than most of the other tools you currently use for munging data about. Taken a step further, while perl is cool at munging text, most of us don't just deal with text - we deal with trees, records, etc. So by combining Perl and XML you get the best of both those worlds. The XML solutions I've seen tend to be the least "hacked" looking systems I've seen in my relatively few years of experience. I know that's not specifically about AxKit. What AxKit does offer is a mature stable system for bringing these tools together, plus it offers nice ways to deliver the same content in different formats. -- <!-- Matt --> <:->Get a smart net</:->
