Re: [xml-dev] XML support in browsers?

[nico <ndebeiss@gmail.com>]

If HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the DOM, are the technologies which describe the Web community, then it is quite close to XML community ! HTML is a kind of XML, the DOM is a way to manage XML, CSS expressions are quite close to XPath, and it is just a way to change the "style" attribute of the XML nodes.

Concerning Javascript, if you want to make lots of data management, only using getElementsByTagName... you will code 10 000 lines of codes before achieving what XSLT does in 50 lines ! Or you will have to use XPath which is a part of XSLT in my mind.

I also saw developers who do not even want to look at a markup, but then you have to rebuild the whole Web ! I am very happy with XSLT. That is what represents a "business" language for me, meaning that it cares about all technical parts for you (multi-language, error management), only letting you decide what you want to do with the data. For sure, first steps are difficult, but there are lots of other functional languages which have proven their efficiency, it is always useful to learn at least one of them, to get the 
"paradigm".

Regards
Nico
http://debeissat.nicolas.free.fr

2009/6/8 Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com>

Michael Kay wrote:

A decade later, it still makes for strange conversation when the XML and Web communities wander into each other's turf, though.

I don't think I understand what you mean by the "Web community". Whom does
it exclude?

By "Web community" I mean the people for whom the Web is their first (and often exclusive) development target.  Its borders are complex, but  if you want a reasonable guideline, I'd point to the set of technologies   on which the Web Standards Project focuses:

http://www.webstandards.org/about/mission/

That's typically HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the DOM.  That's the core set of technologies I find discussed on web design and web development lists, and the core set on which the ever-growing set of web frameworks build.  Web folks I know who care about data exchange often know about XML, but find JSON an easier fit for most applications.

It also includes many sub-communities on the server side, who generate all that stuff using a wide variety of tools.  Some of those subcommunities are XML-centric (or even XSLT-centric), but I can't imagine it's a large proportion of people.

As for who it excludes, I don't think it excludes anyone who works with those core technologies - but degree of focus, priorities, and expectations certainly offer opportunities for culture clashes.  It's not a simple binary, at least until argument is joined and people choose sides.

(Who's in the XML community?  The Web Services community?  Who do they exclude?)

--
Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com/

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