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Re: ::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X
On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 10:39:33AM +0000, Alaric Snell wrote:
> XML has too much stuff that isn't formally specified, requiring human
> intervention in many things :-(
XML has too many things that are badly designed, borken, and just plain
ugly.
> Eg, there is no definition mapping from XML to native data types like there
> is for CORBA and XDR and ASN.1 and Java serialisation and friends. So you
> have to deal with it at the DOM level, otherwise you discard potentially
> vital information.
I believe that part of the reason for XML Schema growing to be so fat,
ugly and consequently near-useless, is that a significant number of people
on the committee were confused about the purpose. Instead of constructing
a general mechanism for describing the topology of data spaces, they instead
spent their time worrying about how they could easily map XML documents into
strictly typed languages like Java.
> XML isn't that easily editable. The non-technical people where I work refuse
> to touch it, no matter how we try! So they ask us to perform menial editing
> tasks for them :-(
Yep, couldn't agree more. I was telling someone the other day about how
I started writing the TT3 documentation using XML and regretted it almost
instantly. That was the final push over the "XML Blows Goats" cliff.
:-)
> They need XML Spy or something. But if we're to use editors for everything
> and never touch the stuff 'directly', why bother what the bit format is?
True.
> What I'm talking about is *semantic* editing as opposed to *syntactic*
> editing. Editing an XML file in Notepad is syntactic editing. Editing it in
> XML Spy is semantic editing. Likewise with PNG files, just substitute the
> Gimp for XML Spy!
Yep, absolutely. TexMacs tries to do something like this - giving you
an emacs like editor which understands the structural nature of LaTeX
documents (article, book, etc) and does a bit of WYSI(nearly)WIG on the
way. Doesn't really shine though.
A