Re: Is xml overhyped?
- From: "Oliver Wong" <owong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 18:35:49 GMT
<casioculture@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1130600537.647739.136280@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>
> I've had an interest in programming for years and have followed its
> trends, but not really took the time to program much. Yes, I read books
> and so on, but always got onto other, more prior things in life to do.
> Now, this time, I really want to learn it, and learn it well.
>
> This time, and in light of previous experience, I plan to keep things
> as simple as can be, as on previous attempts I got too easily sucked
> into trivia. I'm limiting myself to scripting languages, such as python
> and perl. I'm developing an interest in plaintext file formats and
> delimited flatfile 'databases' as they seem quite simple, and can be
> effective for my needs. I plan to spend a year or two on plaintext
> databases and file formats - comma/tab/pipe delimited. This is all
> through 'shell' scripts, sed, awk, perl etc - no GUI, no database
> engine, no web, none of that complexity, not for now.
>
> It seems that the whole world is going xml though. Should I get onto
> learning xml as soon as I can or just leave it till much, much later? I
> understand xml a little, but I find there's too much theoretical
> overhead and I would need to understand all the other things that go
> with it such xslt and so on.
>
> Would I be spending too much time on antiquated techniques if I spend a
> year or two on delimited plaintext and its parsing? or am I doing the
> right thing?
Foo-delimiting (where Foo may be "comma", "tab", "pipe" or something
else) is fine when your data is table-oriented (e.g. every row has the same
number of columns, and every row has the same rank as every other row), but
it does not work well for hierarchial data (every element has a different
number of attributes, and elements can be parents or children of other
elements).
XML is meant for hierarchal data. If you never work with that kind of
data, then don't worry about XML yet. If it looks like you're going to start
working with it, rather than inventing your own text-based format, take a
look at XML and see if it will suit your needs.
BTW, you don't actually need to worry about XFoo when just starting out
with XML (where Foo can be SLT, Query, or something else), but you may want
to look at DTDs and Schemas. Schema is the new thing that's supposed to
replace DTD, but you might still find a lot of references to DTDs in "old"
(e.g. 6 months or older) documents.
- Oliver
.
- References:
- Is xml overhyped?
- From: casioculture
- Is xml overhyped?
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