Re: [xml-dev] hackable xml

[Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com>]

On 26 July 2010 13:53, Richard Salz <rsalz@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> I don't get it -- which community needs this xml-like thing?  And why?

The community that just wants to read or write very simple xml files.

Given:

<config xmlns="http://somecomp.com";>
  <foo>abc</foo>
</config>

...and you want to update the value of <foo>, how would you do it?

Or put more realisticly, a colleague of yours knows very little about
XML and all of its related technologies, and asks you how they should
do it.

- XSLT transform
- XQuery update
- JDOM, XOM etc
- SAX parse and generate the events
- some data-binding tool (if an xsd exists)

All fairly straight forward for the xml community, but to anyone else
each of those seem like a massive overkill for such a seemingly simple
task.  Perhaps there is a simple way that I've missed?

The ultimate goal of hackable xml is to make it possible to just do a
string replace of "<foo>abc</foo>" with "<foo>newValue</foo>" (which
is often what happens anyway, causing many hours of fun) and then
serialize/reparse without any issues.



-- 
Andrew Welch
http://andrewjwelch.com
Kernow: http://kernowforsaxon.sf.net/