[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: If XML is too hard for a programmer, perhaps he'd bebetter

• To: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• Subject: Re: If XML is too hard for a programmer, perhaps he'd bebetter off as a crossing guard
• From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
• Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 17:56:07 -0800
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <3E84767B.50201@t...>
• References: <B885BEDCB3664E4AB1C72F1D85CB29F804B7CA30@R...> <3E84767B.50201@t...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212

Tim Bray wrote:
> Dare Obasanjo wrote:
> 
>> The "Desperate Perl Hacker" argument  was a bogus claim for XML 1.0 
>> because of the existence of entities and CDATA sections but is quite 
>> farcical now with the existence of the Namespaces in XML 
>> recommendation (and it's bastard spawn "QNames in content"). 
> 
> 
> Empirically false, at two levels.  First, lots of people process XML 
> with perl (or equivalent) all the time.  Second, the real requirement 
> was to make it tractable to take a large body of document data and make 
> quick programmatic changes on it.  Which, obviously, XML makes way easier.

The requirement as we understood it years ago was that the person would 
be working with regular expressions and _no XML parser_. (otherwise 
syntactic choices like minimization would have been irrelevant)

Dare is right that XML-as-specified was never simple enough that you 
could reliably process XML with Perl 5 regular expressions. On the other 
hand, the XML one tends to receive, tends to be simple enough that it 
works most of the time. You don't want to build a system around it but 
for one-offs on data sitting on a hard drive, it usually works. CDATA 
sections and entities are easy to "grep' for.

  Paul Prescod

• References:
  • RE: If XML is too hard for a programmer, perhaps he'd be better off as a crossing guard
    • From: "Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@m...>
  • Re: If XML is too hard for a programmer, perhaps he'd bebetter off as a crossing guard
    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>

• Prev by Date: Re: ID/IDREF makes XML generation NP-hard
• Next by Date: Re: If XML is too hard for a programmer, perhaps he'dbe better off as a crossing guard
• Previous by thread: Re: If XML is too hard for a programmer, perhaps he'd be better off as a crossing guard
• Next by thread: RE: If XML is too hard for a programmer, perhaps he'd be better off as a crossing guard
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread