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Derek Denny-Brown wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jonathan Borden [mailto:jborden@mediaone.net]
> :-))) right, and hence your bias, but thanks for admiting it. My bias
is
> that we should get people using only what is needed, rather than the
> fanciest latest greatest and most complex way of solving the problem.
Ahh... but is .Net services implemented an XML subset, which did not
properly detect invalid xml characters, etc... Microsoft would get
lambasted for attempting to 'corrupt' XML. Simplified/optimized
solutions are fine in a closed world environment, but suffer serious
long-term interop issues in an open (Internet) environment.
---
[jb] I am all for strict XML 1.0/XSLT 1.0/XPath 1.0 conformance. All I was
intending is that there is a whole lot of work that can be done quite
effectively by HTTP posting an XML document to a URI, and retrieving a
result in XML.
I have real applications that I have been using for years now written mostly
in XSLT which have parallel server frameworks written in ASP for IIS and
Java for FreeBSD/Apache. I use one inside the firewall for real hospital
work, and one that runs on my ISPs FreeBSD virtual server as a demo
http://www.openhealth.org/opnote/Opnote.htm . The code is really really
simple see: http://www.openhealth.org/download.htm
So my point is only that real useful work _can_ be done without getting
overly complicated. That's all. I also acknowledged that some problems are
honestly hard and the solutions may hence be complicated. That's life.
---
... Part of the problem is the 'Microsoft is Evil'
paranoia that so many people have. When so many people are out to prove
that your company is evil, every design choice which deviates (in any
way) from the standard, needs to be very carefully evaluated. I
honestly believe that the only way to protect Microsoft, when it exposes
XML based services on the Internet, is to ensure that _all_ such
services are using fully conformant XML parsers...
---
[jb] In that case the paranoia about the evil empire is healthy! The flip
side of the problem is that when the 800 pound gorilla deviates from the
standard, people ignore the standard. The small guy can't just walk up and
politely wait to be noticed, he or she has to kick you really really hard in
the shin just to get you to pay attention :-)). But moreover, if you really
want your company's solutions to be standards compliant, you really need
lots of loud complainers to get your upper management's attention.
----
In order to make sure that
people do the right thing, I just push all of them to use our
fully-conformant parser. Yes it is more than they need, but I don't
have time to customize it just for them, nor do I have time to test
their parser and make sure that it isn't allowing non-well-formed XML in
some obscure case.
----
[jb] Yeah well, writing custom parsers is just a waste of time and effort.
The whole point of XML is that we shouldn't be doing that. That's part of
the problem: people are looking for the most complex, perhaps slightly
better in some small facet, way of doing things, rather than the simplest
and generally better way of doing things.
Hence what I tell people: write less code, be happy :-)) Think about
transforms rather than algorithms and let someone else optimize them for
you.
Jonathan
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