On Thursday 08 December 2005 23:17, Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
> > Perhaps because of Sax, Xerces, Xalan, JDom, SOAP, MSXML, XSLT,
> >
> > XPath .... or perhaps simply because I can read the file and grab what
> > I want/need?
>
> More specifically, because you can use the tools you ALREADY KNOW...
>
> There are similar tools for many of those things for other formats -
> you just don't know about them ;).
>
Partially true. And because you know others can use tools they know for your
data without needing you to define the API to them in painful detail.
> > I am myself wondering whether it makes that much difference how
> > something becomes a standard w3c, ANSI, ISO, or common use, just as long
> > as I can read it, process it, and hand it down stream.
>
> Agreed.
>
agreed. The organisations are really not much more than self-interest
groups...
> > XML helps in the
> > reading/processing and open standards help in the passing downstream.
>
> Yes and no.
>
> I've seen XML grammars that are more complicated than the
> alternative, thus making it harder to read/process...
>
>
yes, but their parsing is universally accepted. If you use a compliant XML
generator, another compliant XML parser will work with it. This says nothing
about the business layer being able to work with your data, but at least
you've taken the problem back up to the business layer from the transport
layer.
> > .pdf .shp .swf .dxf are published formats but hard to read/process
>
> For whom? Using what tools?
>
>
that's exactly the point. There are a limited toolsets in a limited number of
languages that handle the above.
But with xml, there are a huge number of APIs in every major language. So we
no longer need to worry about the markup itself, and only need to worry about
the interpretation of the markup.
Remember the bad old days of csv? When a csv file from a germanic country
failed to parse in a program in an anglo country because the anglos separate
with a comma and the germanics separate with semicolon? Every time you needed
to pass csv between 2 applications, you had to worry about whether the
programmers had packaged the data intelligently, and in a world-aware way.
With XML, the standard handles this elegantly.
This alone makes the poison of XML's verbosity and markup that much more
palatable.
Ronan
--
Ronan Oger
Director
RO IT Systems GmbH
...Building Web2.0 with SVG since 2001
http://www.roitsystems.com
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