[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Dissillusioned about interoperability.
On Thu, 7 Oct 1999, Simon St.Laurent wrote: > At 05:13 PM 10/7/99 -0600, Kent Sievers wrote: > >A tool like, say, a markup language other than XML? One that only had one > >way to mark up a simple name/value pair? That is what we left behind. > We haven't left anything behind yet, not by a long run. What I'm talking > about is a tool that would let you map: > > everybody else's damn structures -> my structures You're going to need to do this with a transformation language of some sort - no other solution is going to be flexible enough to deal with the variety of formats in which data is likely to appear. I don't think this is a problem with XML, however, because I don't think specifying structures was the problem XML set out to answer. Indeed, a system rigorous enough to give only one layout for arbitrary data would probably be so complex that no-one would ever use it. The main advantages are: a) XML frees us from writing new parsers to accompany every new structure. b) XML is sufficiently familiar to anyone who's used HTML that it might actually catch on. The real problem is thus that writing transformations seems so painful, and that's really a fault with much of the current software available to do transformations. I'd like to think that XML Script (www.xmlscript.org) is a significant improvement in this field. > Mike Hatalski pointed out IBM's XML Translator Generator - it's one option, > though I'd like to see it given a prettier face. > http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/aw.nsf/techmain/5F60964153C4274788256776006817AA The problem being that this is essentially a DTD-to-DTD mapper. Lots of XML "out there" in the real world is going to be DTD-less or have very underspecified DTDs. More importantly, you're often going to find that you want your transformation to depend on the content/attributes of an element, rather than the element type. This is certainly the case with <object type="myType">content</object> Where you need to look at the `type' attribute to do your transformation. This is comparatively straightforward in XML Script, where you can do things like: <_if test="object.type == myType"></_if> or <_foreach object="object{.type == myType}"></_foreach> -- Richard Lanyon (Software Engineer) | "The medium is the message" XML Script development, | - Marshall McLuhan DecisionSoft Ltd. | 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 unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe 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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