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On Sunday 19 January 2003 18:32, Mike Plusch wrote:
> XML does not have to be verbose in the future.
>
> It _could_ be suitable for ALL applications.
>
> It is desirable to have a common, standard syntax
> that can be used for ALL purposes.
>
> _Mike Plusch
>
>
> How about changing the name to:
> Conci-sex-ml. :)
Now you're talking my kind of language; check out ASN.1, which solved this
problem a zillion years ago. You have a single type system at the core of it,
then multiple encodings of values of those types, from portable byte streams
for interchange to direct representation (access!) as C structs, Pascal
records, Java objects, etc. There's a textual notation for debug dumps and
hand-editing, and there's a shiny new XML notation too.
Since all of these encodings are formally defined in terms of the ASN.1 type
system, automated software can map between them trivially, so you can just
use whatever encoding is appropriate for the situation at hand.
The counterargument is that with XML the set of software needed to edit it is
likely to come with your OS rather than something you have to download
seperately, helping a sysadmin who has to edit an XML configuration file in
single user mode on a broken system to make it boot again, who therefore
couldn't download or install a BER editor, and hadn't had the foresight to
install one beforehand, even knowing that one might be needed to recover the
system later... *shrug* I like to optimise for the common case myself.
ABS
--
A city is like a large, complex, rabbit
- ARP
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