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XML down a slippery slope

3 replies on 1 page. Most recent reply: Sep 24, 2005 5:07 AM by Terje Slettebø

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Christopher Diggins

Posts: 1215
Nickname: cdiggins
Registered: Feb, 2004

XML down a slippery slope (View in Weblogs)
 		Posted: Sep 23, 2005 9:43 AM
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Summary
The trend towards microparsing in XML specifications, is killing the spirt of XML.
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I have been studying the SVG specs when I happened upon the SVG path tag. Much to my dismay, the W3C decided to stuff a micro-language within a single parameter! That is one of the most awful hacks I have ever seen. This completely defeats the purpose of XML! Well so much for the original goals of simplicity and genericity of XML representations. Apparently this is old news. It's a shame the spirit of XML is being ignored in such a blatant manner.


Terje Slettebø

Posts: 205
Nickname: tslettebo
Registered: Jun, 2004

Re: XML down a slippery slope Posted: Sep 24, 2005 4:55 AM
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You may be interested to know that the "Effective XML" book, item 11: "Make Structure Explicit through Markup", also uses the SVG path tag as an example of how _not_ to do things.

The example of SVG is hardly an indication of a "trend" (there are plenty of counter-examples in the W3C specifications), however.

The argument of saving space (in the article you link to) hardly holds water: XML compresses well (especially with a dictionary-type of algorithm, such as LZW), and by using explicit markup for structure, you avoid having to use a mini-parser to parse the output from the parser...

Regards,

Terje

Terje Slettebø

Posts: 205
Nickname: tslettebo
Registered: Jun, 2004

Re: XML down a slippery slope Posted: Sep 24, 2005 5:06 AM
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> The example of SVG is hardly an indication of a "trend"
> (there are plenty of counter-examples in the W3C
> specifications), however.

However, having now read the whole article you linked to, you (and the people quoted in the article) may be right that there is some kind of trend, such as the same stuff being done in CSS.

Terje Slettebø

Posts: 205
Nickname: tslettebo
Registered: Jun, 2004

Re: XML down a slippery slope Posted: Sep 24, 2005 5:07 AM
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Mental note: Read _full_ article before posting. :)

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