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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML=WAP? And DOA?
 From: "Mike Champion" <mc@x...> > 1/13/2002 8:10:02 PM, Paul T <pault12@p...> wrote: > >Sure. And it is kinda more convinient to use CSV, because > >CSV-based world has developed a sophisticated, convinient, > >universal binding mechanizm, called "regular expressions". > > Hmmm, that's an interesting way to put it. What would an XML > universal binding mechanism look like .... a clean > integration of XPath and DOM (and maybe RELAX-NG)? A RELAX- > NG data binding tool > http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~dp8t-asm/java/tools/Relaxer/ ? 0. I belive that regular expressions, as we know them, are also not the best possible binding, because I belive that they should not be greedy. I think they are greedy because of historical reasons and maybe because of 'match/split' processing pattern ( awk ). I think that the uiniverse of non-greedy regular expressions is not yet explored. 1. As to Relaxer: Code generators are always a pain to maintain and to debug. It has taken a long time to get, for example, yacc / lex to output 'everything' ( nopt only C) - and when that happened - both yacc and lex became obsolete (JavaCC). Just look at JavaCC. It is sooo convinient ... but it generates Java only and there is no way I can use JavaCC for, say, Perl. I hate to say it, but it could be that the simplest language-neutral binding mechanizm would be : "take a subset of XML and everything would immediately become simple, otherwise you may keep trying to find that black cat in that dark room for ages". > Both Sun and Microsoft seem to be working hard to make it > easier to use XML from ordinary programming languages; are > either/both at least moving in the direction you want to see? They both are moving into usual direction : to lock-in as many developers, as they can, into the platforms, that they sell. That would be insane for a big software company to provide something that could be easily used outside their core platform. However, that's minor. The most important thing could be that ... no good language-neutral binding is even *possible* for XML v 1.0. Chunks binding is convininent, *only* because it does not support a complex mixed content cases + there is some 'intuitive' whitespace stripping rule. Place the complex mixed content and complex whitespace processing back into the model - and it could be that the *only* possible model for XML *is* DOM. Which is a hell to process without the XPath and even with XPath it is still hard. It has taken a very long time for SML-dev to figure out what could be possibly simplified in the XML model and to me the answer is "... we still don't know, but maybe it is possible ;-)" It is interesting to look at YAML ( even I don't like it ;-) YAML is the 'markup' language, that has been designed *other way around*. They *first* looked at language-neutral data structures and *then* they designed a 'markup'. Of course YAML allows an easy binding! If XML would have been designed 'to serialize Fortran Arrays' that would make XML binding obvious and straightforward. However, I think that there could be some problems, if trying to ask IBM lawyers to map their documents into Fortran arrays ;-) <aside> Also, I think that YAML is too complex, because I think they thought that if they publish only a really simple part of it, nobody would take it seriosly ;-) </aside> <rant> I hate to say it, but I think that all that markup stuff is actually about placing '\' and ',' symbols on steroids in one way or another. Why can't people agree that any 'markup' language is : 0. Everything is (unicode) text. 1. Text can have 'groups' , separated by 'separators' ( the less, the better, but hard to tell in advance ;-) 2. There should be some way to escape separators ( \ works just fine, from my point of view ;-) Isn't it all we need to know about the 'markup language' ;-)? Why restrict ourselvs to 'one markup language, that fits all' ? It is like in early days, before YACC and similiar tools, people were trying to invent 'the best possible programming language, good for everything'. I think it is now obvious that such a programming language does not exist. Why there should be a 'markup language that is good for everything' is a question I have no answer to. ;-) </rant> > >Regular expressions are not blessed by W3C, sure. > > But they are at the heart of RELAX-NG ... I hope we can > distinguish "XML" from "the set of all specs that the W3C has > put out dealing with XML" or "the picture of XML promulgated > by the most visionary W3C working groups." I think it's even worse, than that. There is also: "Maybe XML is not a convinient thing to process, but because the XML text looks nice, let us migrate all the binary formats into some 'industry-blessed' vocabularies and then 'industry-blessed' APIs would deal with the mess. Still that would be better than binary / CORBA driven solution". That would be also the right thing to do! Just some better unification of industry-specific legacy data formats would be better than to keep building on a formats, designed 30+ years ago by hardcore COBOL coders, who cared about saving bytes, because storage was important. Rgds.Paul. 
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