XML

[Bill Sneddon]

I think Nicholas Wiedland made a good case for the techonolgy.

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

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

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