Re: [xml-dev] Create XML

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

J.Pietschmann wrote:
>> I'm certainly not advocating that using XML APIs to create documents is
>> stupid, but surely there's a crossover point where the simplicity of the
>> result doesn't justify the added complexity of an XML API compared to 
>> just
>> building a string?
>>
>> Or have I just committed heresy? :-)

There's one essential piece of extra software beyond print statements 
that you need: an escape() function that takes care of & and < and ' and ".

My single biggest practical problem in generating XML, particularly in 
big systems, is that occasionally other parts of the system send you 
already-escaped data, i.e. with &amp; and &lt; already there.  The 
resulting breakage can be not only weird but highly intermittent and 
thus hard to track down.  So you need to have pretty rigorous discipline 
in distinguishing between literal and XML-syntaxified text.  Note that 
having an XML API won't help you if you unexpectedly feed it 
already-escaped data.
-- 
Cheers, Tim Bray
         (ongoing fragmented essay: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/)