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

[Adam Turoff <ziggy@panix.com>]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2003 at 10:44:14AM -0500, kmhryhpdblyx@spammotel.com wrote:
> I think it's a perfect example.  You can learn XML once and you can then 
> understand the basic syntax of any XML file as opposed to having to learn 
> the syntax of every application you want to use.

Not quite.  The syntax is only worth so much.  That's like saying
once you learn how to use a line-oriented file format that uses # as
a comment character, you can understand any config file.

Learning XML syntax doesn't buy you much.  It doesn't help you debug an
XHTML layout, for example.  Knowing how to debug an XHTML layout doesn't
help you understand why your Ant script is buggy, or where you XSLT
stylesheet bombs out.

> I'm in the camp that thinks XML simplifies life.  The hard part of reading 
> the XML file has already been done by the parser.  My application just 
> needs to know how to call the parser.  Learn it once and your're done.

XML makes some problems simpler, but it is not a universal simplifier.

Being able to shove all of the "hard problems" to the parser only
simplifies one hard problem: syntactic correctness.  Your application
will still need to deal with semantic errors, and must do so in a much
more complicated manner.

Z.

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