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Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust

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Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust

#31

Post by wongarsu »

infogulch wrote: post #26

There are many humongous XML sources. E.g. the Wikipedia archive is 42GB of uncompressed text. Holding a fully parsed representation of it in memory would take even more, perhaps even >100GB which immediately puts this size of document out of reach. The obvious solution is streaming, but streaming appears to not be supported, though is listed under Challenging Future Ideas: https://github.com/Paligo/xee/blob/main/ide…

100GB doesn't sound that out of reach. It's expensive in a laptop, but in a desktop that's about $300 of RAM and our supported by many consumer mainboards. Hetzner will rent me a dedicated server with that amount of ram for $61/month.

If the payloads in question are in that range, the time spent to support streaming doesn't feel justified compared to just using a machine with more memory. Maybe reducing the size of the parsed representation would be worth it though, since that benefits nearly every use case

Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust

#32

Post by j-pb »

mickeyp wrote: post #10

It's interesting to see the slow rehabilitation of XML and its tooling now that there's a new generation of developers who have not grown up in the shadow of XML's prime in the late 90s / early 2000s, and who have not heard (or did not buy into) the anti-XML crowd's ranting --- even though some of their criticisms were legitimate. I've always liked XML, and especially XPath, and even though there were a large number…

XML is still a huge mistake for most stuff. It's fine for _documents_ but not as a data storage solution. Bloat, ambiguities, virtually impossible to canonicalise.

XPath is cute, but if you don't mind bloat, text-only and lack of ergonomics, anyways then Conjunctive Regular Path Queries and RDF are miles ahead of XML as a data storage solution. (Not serialised as XML please xD)

Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust

#33

Post by formerly_proven »

tzcnt wrote: post #19
vessenes wrote: post #13

This, thirty years later, is the best pitch for XML I’ve read. Essentially, it’s a slow moving, standards-based approach to data interoperability. I hated it the minute I learned about it, because it missed something I knew I cared about, but didn’t have a word for in the 90s - developer ergonomics. XML sucks shit for someone who wants to think tersely and code by hand. Seriously, I hate it with a fiery passion. Happ…

Developer ergonomics is drastically underappreciated, even in modern times. Since we're talking about textual data formats, I'll go out on a limb here and say that I hate YAML. Double checking exactly how many spaces are present on each line is tedious. It manages to make a simple task like copy-pasting something from a different file (at a different indentation level) into an error-prone process. I'll take angle bra…

Working with large YAML documents is incredibly annoying and shows the benefit of closing tags.

Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust

#34

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

linguae wrote: post #25
mickeyp wrote: post #10

It's interesting to see the slow rehabilitation of XML and its tooling now that there's a new generation of developers who have not grown up in the shadow of XML's prime in the late 90s / early 2000s, and who have not heard (or did not buy into) the anti-XML crowd's ranting --- even though some of their criticisms were legitimate. I've always liked XML, and especially XPath, and even though there were a large number…

It’s the “slope of enlightenment” phase of the Gartner hype cycle, where people are able to make sober assessments of technologies without undue influence from hype or its backlash. We’re long past the days where XML is used for everything, even when it’s inappropriate, and we’re also past the “trough of disillusionment” phase where people sought alternatives to XML. I think XML is good for expressing document format…

For phone users https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust

#35

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

tzcnt wrote: post #19
vessenes wrote: post #13

This, thirty years later, is the best pitch for XML I’ve read. Essentially, it’s a slow moving, standards-based approach to data interoperability. I hated it the minute I learned about it, because it missed something I knew I cared about, but didn’t have a word for in the 90s - developer ergonomics. XML sucks shit for someone who wants to think tersely and code by hand. Seriously, I hate it with a fiery passion. Happ…

Developer ergonomics is drastically underappreciated, even in modern times. Since we're talking about textual data formats, I'll go out on a limb here and say that I hate YAML. Double checking exactly how many spaces are present on each line is tedious. It manages to make a simple task like copy-pasting something from a different file (at a different indentation level) into an error-prone process. I'll take angle bra…

JSON5 is a real sweet spot for me. Closing brackets, but I don't have to type every tag twice. Comments and trailing commas.

Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust

#36

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

infogulch wrote: post #26

There are many humongous XML sources. E.g. the Wikipedia archive is 42GB of uncompressed text. Holding a fully parsed representation of it in memory would take even more, perhaps even >100GB which immediately puts this size of document out of reach. The obvious solution is streaming, but streaming appears to not be supported, though is listed under Challenging Future Ideas: https://github.com/Paligo/xee/blob/main/ide…

Is that all in one big document?

Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust

#37

Post by JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B »

mickeyp wrote: post #10

It's interesting to see the slow rehabilitation of XML and its tooling now that there's a new generation of developers who have not grown up in the shadow of XML's prime in the late 90s / early 2000s, and who have not heard (or did not buy into) the anti-XML crowd's ranting --- even though some of their criticisms were legitimate. I've always liked XML, and especially XPath, and even though there were a large number…

It's only a sample of one but I'm really unhappy with the issues and limitations that JSON and YAML have, and I welcome XML if it has good tools.

Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust

#38

Post by Telemakhos »

falcor84 wrote: post #12
Telemakhos wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true only of XSLT 1.0. The current standard is 3.0.

Oh, a shame. Is there any way to track browser version adoption on caniuse, or any other site? Also, is it up to browser implementations, or does WHATWG expect browsers to stay at version XSLT 1?

I think it's up to browser implementations, but JSON and JavaScript stole much of XML's thunder in the browser anyway, plus HTML5's relaxed tags won out over XHTML 4's strictness (strictness was a benefit if you were actually working with the data). There are still plenty of web-available uses of XML, like RSS and RDF and podcasts/OPML, but people are more likely to call xmlhttp.responseXML and parse a new DOM than wrap their head around XSL templates.

The big place I've successfully used XSLT was in TEI, which nobody outside digital humanities uses. Even then, the XSLT processing is usually minimal, and Javascript is going to do a lot of work that XSL could have done.

Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust

#39

Post by dleeftink »

infogulch wrote: post #26

There are many humongous XML sources. E.g. the Wikipedia archive is 42GB of uncompressed text. Holding a fully parsed representation of it in memory would take even more, perhaps even >100GB which immediately puts this size of document out of reach. The obvious solution is streaming, but streaming appears to not be supported, though is listed under Challenging Future Ideas: https://github.com/Paligo/xee/blob/main/ide…

StackExchange also, not necessarily streamable but records are newline delimited which makes it easier to sample (at least the last time I worked with the Data Dump).

Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust

#40

Post by chuckadams »

tzcnt wrote: post #19
vessenes wrote: post #13

This, thirty years later, is the best pitch for XML I’ve read. Essentially, it’s a slow moving, standards-based approach to data interoperability. I hated it the minute I learned about it, because it missed something I knew I cared about, but didn’t have a word for in the 90s - developer ergonomics. XML sucks shit for someone who wants to think tersely and code by hand. Seriously, I hate it with a fiery passion. Happ…

Developer ergonomics is drastically underappreciated, even in modern times. Since we're talking about textual data formats, I'll go out on a limb here and say that I hate YAML. Double checking exactly how many spaces are present on each line is tedious. It manages to make a simple task like copy-pasting something from a different file (at a different indentation level) into an error-prone process. I'll take angle bra…

You haven’t felt hate until you’ve counted spaces in your Helm templates in order to know what value to put after `nindent`. The punchline is that k8s doesn’t even speak yaml, the protocol is all json and it’s the tooling that inflicts yaml on us. I can live with yaml as a config format, but once logic starts creeping in, give me anything else.
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