61–70 of 245 posts
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…
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…
There, I said it.
What problems are {elegantly, neatly, best} solved by using XPath and XSLT today that would make them reasonable choices over alternatives?
Using an XML library to iterate through an entire XML document without XPATH is like looping through entire database tables without a JOIN filter or a WHERE clause.
XSLT is the SELECT, transforming XML output with a new level of crazy for recursion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anything could be supported with sufficient effort, but streaming hasn't been my priority so far and I haven't explored it in detail. I want to get XSLT 3.0 working properly first. There's a potential alternative to streaming, though - succinct storage of XML in memory: https://blog.startifact.com/posts/succinct/ I've built a succinct XML library named Xoz (not integrated into Xee yet): https://github.com/Paligo/xoz…
0.2x of the original size would certainly make big documents more accessible. I've heard of succinct storage, but not in the context of xml before, thanks for sharing!
I suspect with the right FM-Index Xoz might be able to store huge documents in a smaller size than the original, but that's an experiment for the future.
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…
XML gives you an object soup where text objects can be anywhere and data can be randomly stored in tags or attributes.
It just doesn't at all match the object model used by basically all programming languages.
I think that's a big reason JSON is so successful. It's literally the object model used by JavaScript. There's no weird impedance mismatch between the data represented on disk and in your program.
Then someone had to go and screw things up with YAML...
JSON5 is the way.
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…
Hello world
(greeting ((attr "val") (href "#")) "Hello " (thing "world"))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…
I wish someone would write "XML - The Good Parts".
Others might argue that this is JSON but I'd disagree:
- No comments is a non-starter
- No proper integers
- No date format
- Schema validation is a primitive toy compared what we had for XML
- Lack of allowed trailing commas
YAML ain't better. I hated whitespace handling in XML, it's a miracle how YAML could make it even worse.
XML is from era long past and I certainly don't want to go back there, but it had its good parts and I feel we have not really learned a lot from its mistakes.
In the end maybe it is just that developer ergonomics is largely a matter of taste and no language will ever please everyone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
There's nothing to track here really. For better or worse, browsers are stuck with 1999's XSLT 1.0, and it's a miracle it's still part of native browser stacks given PDF rendering has been implemented using JS for well over a decade now. XSLT 2 and 3 is a W3C standard written by the sole commercial provider of an XSLT 2 or 3 processor, which is problematic not only because it reduces W3C to a moniker for pushing sale…
What problems are {elegantly, neatly, best} solved by using XPath and XSLT today that would make them reasonable choices over alternatives?
XPath is a very nice language for querying over XML. Most places pitch it as a "declarative" syntax, but as I am quite skeptical of "declarative" as a concept, you can also look at the vast majority of the XPath standard as a way to imperatively drive a multicursor over an XML document, diving in out and out nodes and extracting bits of text and such, without having to write the equivalent code in your language to do…