XML

[Roman Suzi]

On Mon, 23 Jun 2003, Alan Kennedy wrote:

>Paul Boddie wrote:
>
>>> Indeed. The assertion that "7-bit plain text ASCII" is even a
>>> meaningful format is highly dubious, at least when it comes to
>>> understanding the information presented in that format.
>
>Erik Max Francis wrote:
>
>> 7-bit ASCII is pretty clear, it's just ASCII (which only defines the
>> lower 7 bits).
>
>I think we could find our discussion going around in circles here, because one
>person's encoding is another person's format. I think it is appropriate to
>define some terminology for further discussion
>
>Encoding: (Roughly) A mapping from byte values to character glyphs or
>references.
>
>Structure: (Roughly) A sequence of (possibly nested) content areas, with
>embedded character tokens delimiting areas of content, e.g. "\n". It should be
>possible to write a deterministic processor which parses a structure.
>
>Format: A given structure, which may be stored in a file in one or more
>encodings.

OK. When I was talking about plain text, I had in mind that it 
has some proprietary format. For example, I can easily write:

------------------
foo = "123"
bar = "456"
zoo = "la\"lala"
------------------

And it's not very hard to parse that. 
In case of XML I will need something like

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<foo>123</foo><bar>456</bar><zoo>la"lala</zoo>

- not a big deal, but it's harder to parse. And also XML software keeps
changing (or so it seems), and this gives a sense of instability.

XML always gives me a feeling that I do not fully master it (especially it's
DTD part)! And this is after two years of trying to understand it. (Cf: with
Python felt at home after a week or two!)

Sincerely yours, Roman Suzi

P.S. Just look at the neighboor thread:
Subject: minidom toxml() not emitting attribute namespace qualifier

> Using Python 2.2.3, with this example code:

[Code elided]

> The output is missing the "myns" namespace qualifier on the "att"
> attribute. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

That's a bug in minidom.

I reported it back in November 2002, but I wasn't precise enough about version
numbers, so it went unaddressed.

-- 
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