Re: [PLUG] XML, text, and the development of unix

[gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net>]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2003 at 07:25:28AM -0500, Alex Birch wrote:
> I think Makefile is a good example of how XML simplifies life. We can 
> compare Makefile versus Ant for a while. I know that I lost a lot of 
> time because I was using a spaced instead of tabs for my first make file.

That's a pretty poor example, since it involves you simply not
knowing the syntax of the language. It's just as easy (if not
easier, since there's way more syntax to know) to make that same
mistake with XML.

> After this discussion I have thought about starting x utilities for xml.

That sounds like an interesting idea.

> Much like zgrep works on compressed files; xgrep will work on xml files. 
> It will be line-centric.

Shouldn't it really be block-centric (as in, between close and open
tags of the same type), since newlines aren't meaningful in XML?
If so, you'll also need a way to specify how many blocks out from
the matched text you'd like to see data (this shouldn't be hard;
default to 1, -N for more; functionality similar to GNU grep's -C,
-A, and -B).

-- 
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net

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