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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] re: XML SIG 17 September: Elliotte Rusty Harold onWhat's Wro
 At 9:46 AM +0100 9/16/02, Sean McGrath wrote: >>or maybe in many cases you could do away with the API's altogether? > >Yes. There is, it seems to me, as potent a bifurcation between API-centric >XML and notation-centric XML as there is between data heads >and doc heads. There two are related, perhaps two sides of the same >coin, I don't >really have a handle on it but this article >http://www.itworld.com/nl/xml_prac/04182002/ >gives a flavour of the itch I'm trying to scratch. > I think even Walter would agree that a good XML API can be useful for locally processing a particular XML document. :-) The question is not so much whether to use an API, but which API to use and which level it exposes. The article Sean wrote appears to be complaining about an API that was running at too high a level. He needed something lower, closer to the raw sockets. It's not clear if XML APIs were really an issue for him. It also seems from his description that the the system he was dealing with may have been relying on behavior not endorsed by the HTTP standard. The HTTP 1.0 spec states, "The order in which header fields are received is not significant." and "Multiple HTTP-header fields with the same field-name may be present in a message if and only if the entire field-value for that header field is defined as a comma-separated list [i.e., #(values)]. It must be possible to combine the multiple header fields into one "field-name: field-value" pair, without changing the semantics of the message, by appending each subsequent field-value to the first, each separated by a comma." HTTP 1.1 does make it a little clearer that header field order may matter, but only for the case of header fields with the same name, and these can always be replaced by a single header field with a comma separated value in conformant uses. What I will propose tomorrow is a very low level API. It focuses on namespace well-formed XML. It can parse any namespace well-formed XML and generate only namespace well-formed XML. Unlike some other APIs, it does not attempt to layer an additional view on top of XML. It does not try to make XML look like a database table, a method call, an object, or something else that is not XML. It is an XML API, nothing more, nothing less. I do limit the syntactic structures that can be interpreted in different ways. For instance, it will not allow users to distinguish between CDATA sections and the same text encoded in other than a CDATA section. However, the structures it exposes are those defined in XML itself: elements, attributes, processing instructions, etc. I'm not sure if this will bother Walter or not. I guess I'll find out tomorrow. :-) -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002) | | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ 
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