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> On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 01:48:09PM -0700, Uche Ogbuji wrote:
> > > On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 10:13:40PM -0700, Uche Ogbuji wrote:
> > I'm sorry, but I didn't read anything about any specific version of Perl in
> > Tim's article, and my impression was that he meant simple regexen.
> It's OK, he wasn't very clear, but he did say "new" in there somewhere.
>
> > Or are you
> > seriously meaning to put in Tim's mouth that it would be easier to write a
> > YACC-like parser on your own than to re-use an existing XML parser?
>
> No.
Phew! OK.
> > > None the less, it's worth noting that one of the use cases for XML from
> > > the beginning was the "desparate perl hacker" who had to change, say,
> > > part number 1976 to 3072 in 100,000 documents without affecting dates,
> > > and had an afternoon to do it. That specific use case was achieved in
> > > practice for most people.
> >
> > I don't dispute that the use case was met, but I think the use case is as well
> > met by using, say Python/DOM/generators as it is using regexen,
>
> It's hard to do a round-trip transformation in those -- a typical constraint
> is that you must not change the rest of the documents, including
> * white space
> * entity references
> * cdata sections
> so that a textual "diff" will show what was altered.
>
> I agree with you that using a parser is better in general, but the point is
> that XML is amenable to either approach.
OK. I wasn't getting this point before, and it's a good one. Of course, I'd
be much happier if more lexically rich XML APIs were the norm, but I think
that would tend to make them *harder* and not easier for developers, so I
think that's really a branch off to a different thread.
On that thread somwhere would be my wishing that Simon would some day find it
in his heart to port his experientations to Python :-)
--
Uche Ogbuji Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net http://4Suite.org http://fourthought.com
Use internal references in XML vocabularies - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerw
orks/xml/library/x-tipvocab.html
Universal Business Language (UBL) - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/l
ibrary/x-think16.html
EXSLT by example - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-exslt.html
The worry about program wizards - http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=7238
Use rdf:about and rdf:ID effectively in RDF/XML - http://www-106.ibm.com/develo
perworks/xml/library/x-tiprdfai.html
Keep context straight in XSLT - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/libra
ry/x-tipcurrent.html
Using SAX for Proper XML Output - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/03/12/py-xml.ht
ml
SAX filters for flexible processing - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml
/library/x-tipsaxflex.html
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