Re: [xml-dev] Best way to create an XML document

[COUTHURES Alain <alain.couthures@agencexml.com>]

Mukul Gandhi a écrit :
> Please see: http://www.research.ibm.com/xj/
>   
Thank you for this link.

Xj is indeed a very ambitious project but I'm afraid it's not anymore 
active and it doesn't seem to have Sun approval...

I think the preprocessor approach is good when it can be completely 
separated from the effective compilation.It can be done for static 
internal XML document loading while xj goals need a much more integrated 
approach...

Human brain can easily read sophisticated syntaxes but XML is human 
readable only when there is a perfect indentation and it is a problem 
with the string approach. JSON is more compact than XML and it's an 
advantage when reading this notation. Function calls approach (DOM, 
SAX-like, XLINQ,...) are, from my point of view, less human readable 
than well-indented XML and could also be automatically generated by an 
XSL transformation so why not use the XML notation instead !

Comparing Java versus Visual Basic, I would say Visual Basic is easier 
to read because indentation is almost mandatory (only one instruction 
per line) and no closing brakets ('}') but explicit end keywords (End 
If, End Sub,...). For many reasons, I think source files should be 
stored in full XML (even expressions such as "a+b") while intelligent 
editors would display and allow to modify them using a syntax such as 
the ones we know (the very old C syntax is still alive !) : it would 
then be easy to have static internal XML documents embedded.

Alain COUTHURES
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