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Re: What is XML For?

• To: "Anthony B. Coates" <abcoates@T...>
• Subject: Re: What is XML For?
• From: tblanchard@m...
• Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 13:35:54 +0200
• Cc: xml-dev <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <E1851Zg-0006hP-00@FUSMTA02-LRS>

Yeah. thats what you would want, but thats not an XML PList - (defined 
as what the PList serializer will write out).  It was a counter to "now 
PLists are XML".   The xmlization of plists has not been a good thing.

On Friday, October 25, 2002, at 12:17  PM, Anthony B. Coates wrote:

> ** Reply to message from tblanchard@m... on Fri, 25 Oct 2002 
> 10:56:25 +0200
>
> Speaking of things that only a mother could love, I think a better XML 
> approach
> would be along the lines of
>
> <library>
>   <CD>
>     <artist>Alice Cooper</artist>
>     <title>Goes To Hell</artist>
>   </CD>
> </library>
>
> which is no harder to write than your curly braces version, especially 
> if you
> are using an XML editor that at least knows how to put in the close 
> tags.  You
> can always use a stylesheet to generate your verbose XML sample below. 
>  If you
> compare the literal XML-isation of a text format to the original text 
> format,
> the XML version will always look bigger and uglier, but that is 
> because literal
> transformations, like literal translations of languages, usually 
> produce poor
> results.  You need to think about how you would *really* approach the 
> problem
> from each side of the technology divide.
>
> 	Cheers,
> 		Tony.
>
>> Yeah, but the XML representation is so fugly that nobody that writes
>> one by hand uses the XML format.  Also, I think you'd cringe yourself
>> at what is represented - nothing semantically interesting.  You get
>> something like (off the top of my head)
>>
>> <dictionary><key>CDs</key>
>> 	<array>
>> 		<item><dictionary>
>> 			<key>artist</key><string>Alice Cooper</string>
>> 			<key>title</key><string>Goes To Hell</string></dictionary>
>> 		</item>
>> 	</array>
>> </dictionary>
>>
>> vs
>>
>> { CDs = (
>> 		{ artist = "Alice Cooper"; title = "Goes To Hell"; }
>> 	);
>> }
> ====
> Anthony B. Coates, Information & Software Architect
> mailto:abcoates@T...
> MDDL Editor (Market Data Definition Language)
> http://www.mddl.org/
>
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