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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: terra incognita
 On Mon, Dec 17, 2001 at 01:57:32AM -0800, Dare Obasanjo wrote: | > At the end of the day code and data just aren't that much | > like each other. Maybe this is why Lisp never took over the | > world, cool though it is. -Tim | | It is very interesting that you say this. I've seen a few people | from the Lisp camp complain that XML is simply a more verbose yet | less powerful reinvention of Lisp S-expressions with a lot of | extra complexity added in (like namespaces, attributes and | entity references). I assume this is what led the proposal of | Minimal XML by the SML folks. It is important that a serialization language accomplishes two goals simultaneously. First, it must represent the structure of the information being serialized. Second, it must do so in a way that is human readable. For document markup, where you need out-of-band information, attributes and mixed content are essential. In this field, Common XML excels (although I would say that SGML's optional tag rules would make the texts even more human readable). | Being primarily from a database and distributed computing | background, I'm interested in XML primarily as a data | storage/serialization format so I see it primarily as data | thus when I see things like XSLT and XQueryX, I can't help | but think that the Lisp folks may be right about XML and | it's relationship to Lisp S-expressions. It is this domain, data serialization that I think XML is sub-optimal. In this case, mixed content is rarely useful and attributes cause more confusion than they help. Mixed content can be modeled as a list of maps, and attributes can be made into full-blown elements. This is clearly seen with RELAX-NG, which minimizes the difference between elements and attributes. When working with Minimal XML (in practice), I found the primary construct, a sequence of named elements, to have a high dissonnance with both relational databases _and_ most programming languages. I then dug heavily into SOAP, where the semantics required by programming languages are layered on top of XML. In the end, however, this makes SOAP very complicated. The SOAP user must respect all of the rules of XML (which were designed for structured documents), the SOAP restrictions on XML, and then the additional SOAP constructs. Certainly SOAP meets the requirements of serialising data structures from programming languages, however, I feel it does so at a very heavy cost to readability. Furthermore, this bolting leaves SOAP systems with a rather indeterministic information model and XML tools (XSLT) which must be used very carefully in order not to violate the SOAP schema. This is further complicated since there are application schemas which must further be layered on top of SOAP. That said, I'm a big SOAP fan. It has enabled me to do the things that I need to get done. However, SOAP has lead me to to co-develop an alternative, which I hope you all may one day find useful. It is called YAML, and it strikes what I believe is a sweet spot for data serialization. Since I view XML as primarly a structured document serialization, I don't see YAML as competing with XML, as much as it competes with SOAP. You can read more about YAML at http://yaml.org, the current working draft specification is at http::/yaml.org/spec. It is relatively stable now and we don't expect any huge changes in the syntax or information model. Sometime early next year it will become a release canidate, and a few implementations will follow. Currently, Brian Ingerson has written a Perl implementation and I'll be working on the C implementation as time permits. Right now I have a hobbled Python implementation of YAML which works wonderfully for my particular needs. I hope this is helpful, Clark -- Clark C. Evans Axista, Inc. http://www.axista.com 800.926.5525 XCOLLA Collaborative Project Management Software 
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