[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Another look at namespaces
Paul Prescod writes: > This sounds similar to me to a goal we set in designing XML. It's > become corrupted over time but as I recall the original goal was > that XML should not only be implement but "hackable" in the sense > that you could sit down with Perl and Awk regular expressions and > do cool things with XML documents like rename element types and so > forth. Yes, the famous Desperate Perl Hacker. Granted, that was a slightly excessive goal, but in striving for it, the XML WG did create something that was implementable. I had the first AElfred prototype running in a couple of evenings, while I had spent over a year on and off trying to come up with a Java-based SGML parser. The goal of writing an XML parser in a week (i.e. 40-50 hours) is very attainable, even by non-specialists. I agree that there's little point in writing XML parsers any more, but the fact that they were trivially easy to write helped massively with their adoption -- the irony of the simplicity (or worse-is-better) principle is that, in the end, it conceals itself: now that there is lots of XML parsing software, it doesn't matter whether XML is simple or complex (because the complexity is hidden from the application); but that software wouldn't exist if XML hadn't been so simple in the first place. That's why, for example, we never ended up with a single Java-based SGML parser (even though it would be just as easy to process SGML if we did have the libraries). All the best, David -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.com/ xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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