lxml/ElementTree and .tail

[Uche Ogbuji]

Paul McGuire wrote:
> Thankfully, I'm largely on the periphery of that universe (except for being
> a sometimes victim).  But it is certainly frustrating to see many of the OMG
> concepts of the 90's reimplemented in Java services, and then again in
> XML/SOAP, with no detectable awareness that these messaging and
> serialization problems have been considered before, and much more
> thoroughly.

You'll be surprised at how many XMLers agree that Web services are a
pretty inept reinvention of CORBA.  I was pretty much slain by this
take:

http://wanderingbarque.com/nonintersecting/2006/11/15/the-s-stands-for-simple

I think Duncan Grisby of OmniORB put it most succintly when he pointed
out that SOAP and friends are more complex, more bloated, and less
interoprable than CORBA ever was.  But they use XML so they get the
teacher's pet treatment.


> I liked XML when I could read it and hack it out in Notepad.

You still can, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.  I've always
argued that XML doesn't work unless it's Notepad-hackable.  I do
usually allow an exception for SVG.

> I like
> attributes, which puts me on the outs with most XML zealots who forswear the
> use of attributes on purely academic grounds (they defeat the future
> possible expansion of an attribute's value into more complex substructure).

Really?  Do you have any references for this?  I haven't seen much
criticism of attributes since the very early days, and almost all XML
technologies make heavy use of attributes.  Here's my take:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-eleatt.html

As you can see, elements and attributes get equal billing.

> I dislike namespaces, especially the default xmlns kind, as they make me
> take extra steps when retrieving nodes via Xpaths; and everyone seems to
> think their application needs namespaces, when there is no threat that these
> tags will ever get mixed up with anyone else's.

Namespaces are possibly the worst thing to have ever happened to XML.
Again, my take:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-namcar.html

And yes, default namespaces are about 50% of the problem with
namespace.  QNames in content (which are of course an abuse of
namespaces) are almost all of the other 50%.  I call them "hidden
namespaces":

http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/2006-08-14/Some_thoug

--
Uche Ogbuji                               Fourthought, Inc.
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