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RE: XML too hard for programmers?

• To: "Chet Murthy" <chet@w...>,<xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: XML too hard for programmers?
• From: "Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@m...>
• Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 21:52:44 -0800
• Thread-index: AcLt0xniOiL4z7IyQg6GjC51a6UH4AAAFGfw
• Thread-topic: XML too hard for programmers?

Tim is basically asking for pull-based XML parsers, implementations of
which exist in .NET Framework and the Java world. There isn't much
difference between his mythical Holy Grail example

while (<STDIN>) {
  next if (X<meta>X);
  if    (X<h1>|<h2>|<h3>|<h4>X)
  { $divert = 'head'; }
  elsif (X<img src="/^(.*\.jpg)$/i>X)
  { &proc_jpeg($1); }
  # and so on...
}

and its C# equivalent which has been available in the .NET Framework for
over a year


while (xmlreader.Read()){

	if(reader.NodeType.Equals(XmlNodeType.Element) &&
reader.Name.Equals("meta")){
		continue;
	}


      if((reader.Name.Equals("h1") || reader.Name.Equals("h2")
	   || reader.Name.Equals("h3") || reader.Name.Equals("h4")) && 
         reader.NodeType.Equals(XmlNodeType.Element)){
	 divert = "head";
 
	}else if (reader.NodeType.Equals(XmlNodeType.Element) &&
reader.Name.Equals("img")){

		string jpegurl = reader.GetAttribute("src); 

		if((jpegurl != null) && jpegurl.EndsWith(".jpg")){
				ProcessJpeg(jpegurl);

		}
	}
}


His Perl + pseudocode is more verbose than the actual C# code but the
functionality he claims to want is right there and terseness isn't
really a place where C# can compete with Perl anyway.  

Tim's post indicates that he is quite disconnected from the world of
modern XML programming practices, I especially like his "The notion that
there is an 'XML data model' is silly and unsupported by real-world
evidence" quote. I'm interested in what criteria he used to determine
that the thousands of users of XPath, XSLT and the DOM don't count as
"real-world evidence". 


-- 
PITHY WORDS OF WISDOM 
Never eat yellow snow.                                     

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no
rights. 

>  
>  
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chet Murthy [mailto:chet@w...] 
> Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2003 10:45 PM
> To: xml-dev@l...
> Cc: chet@w...
> 
> 
> Regarding Tim's comments, I was wondering if anybody had good 
> examples of the sort of XML processing that Tim is talking about.
> 
> I wrote some processors to deal with the dmoz.org RDF files, 
> and found that streaming XML processing wasn't trivial, but 
> that with sufficient tool support, it wasn't bad at all.
> 
> But I thought I'd ask the community if anybody had good 
> examples of this.
> 
> Basically, I think that with a sufficient library of 
> examples, in the form of a set of inputs, a program which 
> processes them, and a complaint about why the program is 
> uglier than it should be, a developer could go off and try to 
> improve the situation.
> 
> The larger the library, the better-informed that developer would be.
> 
> Me, I have a lot of RDF stuff.  But RDF/XML is itself rather 
> weird and crufty, in ways which far surpass XML, so that's 
> not a good example.
> 
> --chet--
> 
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• Follow-Ups:
  • If XML is too hard for a programmer, perhaps he'd be better off as a crossing guard
    • From: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...>
  • RE: XML too hard for programmers?
    • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
  • Re: XML too hard for programmers?
    • From: Daniel Veillard <veillard@r...>
  • An approach to let XML 2.n resources hold multiple entities
    • From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...>

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