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Please no one GIYF me! :)
I guess I see how it's extremely valuable in that you can create databases with
relatively simple coding. But my real question is, How do *you* look at it? Is
there some application that GUI's the data in the way that, say Excel or
Lotus123 can GUI a CSV? Or does everyone just suffer through the plain text
version?
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XML is based on HTML. (Or, more pedantically, HTML and XML are both
based on SGML.)
HTML is a *markup language*. It takes a big block of text, and inserts
one or two small marks to indicate section headings, hyperlinks, text
emphasis, and so on. But basically it's a textual document, just with a
few formatting marks.
XML is intended to be a universal way to represent all data. Which isn't
nearly the same thing. It's called eXtensible Markup Language, but it's
really eXtensible Container Format.
It is no secret that human-readable file formats tend to be much, much
more portable (and extensible). Suddenly you don't have to deal with
things like big-endian vs little-endian, signed vs unsigned, 32-bit vs
64-bit, etc. (No, instead you have to deal with the details of ASCII
number formatting, e.g., is ".5" acceptable? Or must it be "0.5"?)
It's also no secret that textual formats are less efficient. (But hey,
it never stopped PostScript!)
The nice thing about XML is that, since it's a standard, anybody that
wants to can make up some format based on XML, and then anyone who
understands XML has some small chance of figuring out what it all means.
There are standard XML parsing and processing libraries. There are
standard tools for searching, sorting and transforming XML into other XML.
The problem is... sometimes XML isn't a good fit. From what I can tell,
SVG works reasonably well. But something like MathML is... impossible to
read or write by hand. It's just absurd. The format is clearly and
obviously designed for ease of machine manipulation, not for humans.
There is also the minor detail that XML is actually quite a lot more
complex than most people realise. Most people think that "XML" just
means "write stuff in little angle brackets". In fact there is much,
much more to it than that. It's quite unecessarily complicated, in fact!
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And lo On Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:11:51 -0000, gregjohn <pte### [at] yahoo com>
did spake thusly:
> Please no one GIYF me! :)
>
> I guess I see how it's extremely valuable in that you can create
> databases with
> relatively simple coding. But my real question is, How do *you* look at
> it? Is
> there some application that GUI's the data in the way that, say Excel or
> Lotus123 can GUI a CSV? Or does everyone just suffer through the plain
> text
> version?
I just look at it raw, all I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead ;-) But
seriously there's software out there like MindFusion or XMLFox that'll
give you tree or grid views, if you're willing to pay then there's Liquid
XML Studio which I've heard good things about.
--
Phil Cook
--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> The nice thing about XML is that, since it's a standard, anybody that
> wants to can make up some format based on XML, and then anyone who
> understands XML has some small chance of figuring out what it all means.
> There are standard XML parsing and processing libraries. There are
> standard tools for searching, sorting and transforming XML into other XML.
There's one advantage of XML being standardized: It's an easy standard way
of encoding text in a way that any XML parser can understand.
If you use a custom file format which must contain text which can use any
Unicode characters, you always have to either decide on an encoding format,
or add support for the user defining the character encoding (ISO Latin-1?
ISO Latin-9? UTF-8? UTF-16LE? UTF-16BE? EUC_JP? Shift-JIS? ISO 2022-JP?)
With XML you don't have to bother because XML libraries already support any
such character encodings out-of-the-box.
Note that with XML, even if you specify a character encoding which doesn't
support the full Unicode character set (such as ISO Latin-1), you can *still*
specify any Unicode character regardless (using the &#...; format), so it's
not a problem.
Thus it becomes a convenient way for programs to support text with any
standardized character encoding, without the program having to worry about
it (as long as it uses some competent XML parser library).
Now, if XML was just a bit less verbose...
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> Now, if XML was just a bit less verbose...
Apparently some people advocate something called YAML, which looks
utterly horribly to me.
Some other people advocate JSON. (I have no idea what that does with
text encodings.)
One of the more irritating things about XML is that it doesn't support
character entities by name. You cannot write, say, … and get a
horizontal ellipsis. You have to write … instead.
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> One of the more irritating things about XML is that it doesn't support
> character entities by name. You cannot write, say, … and get a
> horizontal ellipsis. You have to write … instead.
Don't you mean …? Anyways, you can do this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE foo [
<!ENTITY hellip "…">
]>
<doc>
Hello… there!
</doc>
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> Don't you mean …?
Erm... possibly?
> Anyways, you can do this:
>
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
> <!DOCTYPE foo [
> <!ENTITY hellip "…">
> ]>
>
> <doc>
> Hello… there!
> </doc>
Sure.
For every single entity you want to use.
For every individual XML document you ever write.
Still, I guess that's still a lot easier than trying to find a way to
actually type Unicode symbols and save them in a text file in such a way
that they don't get horribly mangled.
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> For every single entity you want to use.
> For every individual XML document you ever write.
You don't have to type them manually every time. Text editors support this
thing called copying&pasting. It can even be used to copy text from one
document to another.
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> For every single entity you want to use.
>
>> For every individual XML document you ever write.
>
> You don't have to type them manually every time. Text editors support this
> thing called copying&pasting. It can even be used to copy text from one
> document to another.
Sure. If you already have another document to hand with all the entities
in it. It just means that every time you want to write some XML, you've
got to past 8 KB of definitions in at the top. (Or manually figure out
which ones you actually need in this particular document, and chop out
the rest.)
It's just rather messy.
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> It just means that every time you want to write some XML, you've
> got to past 8 KB of definitions in at the top.
What do you need 300 symbols for? Could you even remember that many?
--
- Warp
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