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Re: shared costs (was something about infoset has two daddies)

• To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Subject: Re: shared costs (was something about infoset has two daddies)
• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 12:02:39 -0700
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• References: <r01050300-1015-3894D8B6B44111D69F470003937A08C2@[192.168.124.21]>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.1b) Gecko/20020722

Simon St.Laurent wrote:

> Geez.  I guess we've come a long way from:
> --------------------
> "I think most XML processors are going to be purpose-built for the
> needs of particular applications, and will thus hide inside them.
> Which is good; XML's simplicity makes this approach cost-effective.
> Failing that, parsers will be full-dress validating parsers with
> incremental parsing for authoring support.  So I'm not sure that
> there's all that much need for a standalone processor, but I'd love
> to be wrong." [1]
> -------------------

Was I ever wrong.  For a while I thought that the widespread use of a 
few XML processors was evidence of a design failure in XML, i.e. anyone 
should have been able to roll their own.  On reflection, even if you 
took the cruft out of XML (entities, etc) I think that outsourcing 
processing would have been the way to go.  A few of the really valuable 
things about XML, especially efficient Unicode processing, turn out to 
be hard enough that you would like to avoid writing the code if you can.

Also using a processor has the considerable advantage that you don't 
have to invent your own API. -Tim

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: shared costs (was something about infoset has two daddies)
    • From: Erik Wilde <net.dret@d...>

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  • shared costs (was something about infoset has two daddies)
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

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