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Re: ten years later, time to repeat it?

• From: "Pete Cordell" <petexmldev@c...>
• To: "Len Bullard" <len.bullard@u...>,"Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>, <xml-dev@l...>
• Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:31:59 -0000

I don't have the breadth of experience that many on this list have, but to
me mixed content seems pretty important to a document oriented view.  In
that scenario, in a world where few things are ever perfect, XML seems about
as good as you can get (entities, namespaces and other things that people
grumble about aside).

This provision for document features does compromise XML for purely
data-applications though, where JSON seems to be better.

My view is that the world could do with 2 data formats, something XML-like
primarily for documents and something JSON-like for pure data.  In this
view, tools like XSLT would be able to consume both formats (possibly using
some form of auto-detection and using some form of XML infoset common 
intermediate form) and maybe even be able to output both formats (via some 
kind of switch).

That said, JSON seems to be contaminated with JavaScript cruft.  For
example, instead of:

    "foo": 123

you should be able to do:

    foo: 123

AIUI it is now considered bad form to directly put JSON into a JavaScript
eval statement, so these extra quotes are already only there for historical
reasons.  JSON's set of types seems pretty limited also.  So maybe while
re-writing XML, it would be worthwhile re-writing JSON also!

Pete Cordell
Codalogic
Visit http://www.codalogic.com/lmx/ for XML C++ data binding
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Len Bullard"
To: "Simon St.Laurent" <>; <>
Sent: Monday, February 11, 2008 11:03 PM
Subject: RE:  ten years later, time to repeat it?


> Amazing how that works out.  I'd love to have a few shekels for every time
> I
> was beat over the head about the MCM.  But like attributes, they seem to
> be
> a natural feature of the way we organize information even if an illogical
> one.
>
> You might be right about the users, but the systems implementers would
> notice PDQ.  How would you like to rewrite Visual Studio?
>
> len (evil geniuses for a better tomorrow)
>
>
> From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:]
>
> Len Bullard wrote:
>> In those days, while the sites that did use SGML were quite large and
> housed
>> mission critical data and were mostly in the US.  Today we have a problem
>> identifying what the most significant uses of XML are and where the
>> significant uses of XML are.  The ones we do know about, on the other
> hand,
>> are spread all the way across the planet.
>
> Remember that I'm only talking about a clean subsetting.  And, to be
> honest, I suspect 90% or more of users wouldn't notice even if their XML
> parser was mysteriously replaced with a parser that only took the subset.
>
> Sure, it's difficult, though.
>
> > <pointedTroll>
> > Are you actually DEFENDING the Mixed Content model, Simon?
> > </pointedTroll>
>
> It's the only place where I see XML as having a significant advantage
> over JSON or YAML, so yes, I suppose that constitutes a defense.
>
> And heck, 97% of my work involves mixed content of some sort or another.
>
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• Follow-Ups:
  • RE: ten years later, time to repeat it?
    • From: Joe Fawcett <joefawcett@h...>

• References:
  • RE: ten years later, time to repeat it?
    • From: Len Bullard <len.bullard@u...>