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Re: Partyin' like it's 1999

• To: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
• Subject: Re: Partyin' like it's 1999
• From: Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@e...>
• Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 16:06:05 +0200
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <417F9905.3080400@m...>
• References: <417F8F4A.3000407@p...> <417F9905.3080400@m...>
• User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.8 (Macintosh/20040913)

Elliotte Harold wrote:
> Sean McGrath wrote:
>> 1) The lack of sane, simple roundtrippability. I read in some XML, I 
>> write it straight back out again. I loose stuff on the way. R u nuts? 
>> And you call this a machine processible data format:-)
> 
> In my experience if you really care about anything you lose (CDATA 
> sections, entity references vs. characters, etc.), that's a serious code 
> smell that indicates a major flaw in the stuff. Yeah, the stuff that 
> comes out may not be as nicely formatted for humans reading it with more 
> or a text editor, but often even that can be fixed with appropriate 
> options on the serializer.

Well letting Sean's C14Nish needs on the side, the "humans reading it" 
part is of some importance ain't it? :) Like you I find RNG much easier 
to read than RNC. However, on a recent ongoing project I am co-editing a 
fairly large and modularized RNG with other people, one of whom is using 
a so-called "XML editor". After his edit passes, the output looks a lot 
more like a DB dump than anything remotely human usable. Sure it's a 
tool problem, but most of the current XML tools are pretty bad at 
supporting XML's textuality properly.

-- 
Robin Berjon

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    • From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>

• References:
  • Re: Partyin' like it's 1999
    • From: Sean McGrath <sean.mcgrath@p...>
  • Re: Partyin' like it's 1999
    • From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>

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