Re: [Q] Text vs Binary Files

From: Michael Wojcik (mwojcik_at_newsguy.com)
Date: 05/29/04 

Date: 29 May 2004 04:19:10 GMT

In article <9Rttc.4587$Eu3.44552281@news-text.cableinet.net>, Ben Measures <saint_abroadremove@removehotmail.com> writes:
> Arthur J. O'Dwyer wrote:
>
> XML was created to solve the problem of the HTML version mess.

No it wasn't. It was created to provide an SGML binding that would
be suitable for a wide range of structured document types, with a
view toward producing a platform-agnostic structured data format.
Look at the original XML Working Draft[1], not to mention any of the
official W3C XML documents since.

XHTML was created to clean up HTML - almost three years after XML 1.0
was released.

> It's so good it's almost magical.

It's just a popular SGML binding, really - the base technology was
there in the 1980s. XML is a clever use of SGML, true; for example,
XML Schema was a smart idea, since it replaces DTDs (which are not
themselves written in XML) with an equivalent which *is* written in
XML, so you only need one parser rather than two in order to process
both a document and its specification. And the peripheral standards
like XPath and XSLT and so forth are very handy. The real success
story of XML is the marketing, though.

I like XML as much as the next fellow, assuming he believes it's a
decent format for structured data in some situations, with a wide
range of tools available, and sufficiently popular that I have to
support it anyway. But it is not, of course, a silver bullet.

> Unless you're using somebody else's parser, which may not be broken.
> Such as libxml2 which is *very* unlikely to be broken.

I can't speak for libxml2, but many, many people use the Xerces
parser, and anyone who subscribes to the Xerces mailing lists
knows that there are still bugs aplenty there. Full-featured
XML parsers, particularly ones like Xerces that try to incorporate
everything allowed by the standard and provide multiple APIs in
the bargain, are big and tough to get right.

Hmm. Just checked, and libxml2 has had bug fixes released publically
as recently as 17 May.[2]

1. http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xml-961114.html
2. http://www.xmlsoft.org/news.html 

-- 
Michael Wojcik                  michael.wojcik@microfocus.com
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead ... but the social
and political history of Europe would be exactly the same if Dante and
Shakespeare and Mozart had never lived.  -- W. H. Auden

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