XML

[Roman Suzi]

On Sun, 22 Jun 2003, Bill Sneddon wrote:

>I am currently most excited about XSL and the ability to separte
>content from presenttaion.  

Ofcourse I checked XSLT for my purposes. But I found it a waste
of resources. Vanilla XSLT can't create two or more output docs
from XML sources, for example. XSLT is much hard to program
than for example Python.

>HTML is about presenting the data it
>does not tell you about the data or give hints on how to process.
>This is why web searches currently turn up a lot of irrelavent hits.
>As XML comes into play on the web searches and bots will be much more
>useful.

hmmm... have not seen XML much on web-pages.

>I had an application at work to convert a flat text file to formatted 
>document.  Ultimately a MS Word document.  Using Python.

I made something like this for my book. But I made it differently: first I
created an HTML with extra (non-HTML) markup by Python, then I wrote
search-and-replace VB macro to convert that markup to whatever Word
likes. So, only tables and pre-s were done via HTML - everything
else appeared directly in the Word. Intresting, that plain "text->
special HTML"-script worked faster than "HTML->Word" VB one ;-)

>The first approach create a rich text format document import into word.
>Very combersome and scrapped.
>
>Second approach create a HTML document and import into word.  Worked but
>was not very flexable to change formatting.
>
>Third approach create XML document use XSL to convert it HTML.  It seems
>counter intutive that this was a cleaner approach but IMHO it was.
>
>Check out XSL(T) if you have a need to display data in HTML XHTML.
>Pyana a sourceForge project works well for the transforms.  Newer 
>versions of Explorer or Mozilla will do the transforms without code.
>
>Bill
>
>Roman Suzi wrote:
>> On Sun, 22 Jun 2003, Alan Kennedy wrote:
>> 
>> <skip plain text vs. other formats debate>
>> 
>>>4. Semantics vs. format: The OP was concerned with finding good use cases for
>>>XML, where it is a natural fit for the problem at hand. He seemed to be
>>>dissatisfied with XML both as a format, and as a method for building semantic
>>>object models. 
>> 
>> 
>> Well formulated, Alan! This is exactly what I tried to tell.
>> 
>> 
>>>My thinking is that it is the process of mapping format ->
>>>semantics that is the key issue: The easier that is, the more likely it is to be
>>>usable and to catch on. I think XML will continue to be grow in usage (not
>>>always used appropriately) because the format is trivial for people to
>>>understand (at a minimum requirements level), there is a common data model which
>>>most people can get their heads around, and the mapping from one to the other is
>>>easily dealt with through usage of the plethora of high-quality, standards
>>>compliant XML processing software that is out there.
>> 
>> 
>> I hope that after, say, 10 years there will be XML tools as stable as 
>> D.Knuth's TeX (he promised many dollars to those who find errors in his
>> code). By that date XML will be in much better position than today.
>> Of course, XML standards body need to be stable as well.
>> 
>> Plain text also suffered from format problems: we still have thousands
>> of encodings and 3 major variants of line-endings.
>> 
>> And, to remain on topic, I hope Python 3 will be ISO and/or ANSI standard ;-)
>> 
>> Sincerely yours, Roman Suzi
>
>

Sincerely yours, Roman Suzi
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