Re: Just Started XSL
Andy Dingley wrote:
On 28 Aug, 03:03, Lew <no...@lewscanon.com> wrote:
XML can no more serve as a programming language than can
a comma-separated values (CSV) file. It's a *data* format, not a programming
language.
I'd (sometimes) even question that it's even that much. It's a format
certainly, but even reverse-engineering the XML-Infoset specification
onto something that was initially defined as a serialisation and a
parsing model but no more than that was an uphill task. You can
extract some "data" from XML documents, but not in a logically well-
defined fashion. Once you start to push the envelope of it, you'll
start to find serious holes in how to read this format and extract the
data from it.
I've been using XML for over a decade and I disagree with your assessment.
"Uphill task"? The first time I used it, with a week's knowledge of it, I was
able to use it very effectively as a data format. In fact, it was so robust
and easy that it accelerated an EDI-to-database project by at least an order
of magnitude. I have yet to find any holes in how to read and extract from
XML, much less serious ones.
The obvious contrast is RDF & RDF/XML. That's a well-defined data
model first that then had a serialisation defined for it.
XML is general purpose and semantically void. It is possible to use it for
any number of "well-defined data models".
As for serialization, JAXB is another thing that just worked after a day or
two of my first exposure to it.
--
Lew