Re: [xml-dev] Towards XML 2.0

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

> On Tue, 2010-12-07 at 20:25 -0500, Kurt Cagle wrote:
>> That's one of the central problems with any solution of getting XML on
>> the browser

For me "getting XML on the browser" isn't the goal.. it's making XML
easier to work with for the average dev - the reading and writing of
config files, generating the intermediate formats etc.

The typical problems that I see that frustrate people to point of
hating XML are just because they've treated it as a string - encoding
issues, broken namespaces, lone amperstands and left angle brackets
etc.  What appears to be a simple change to the file (say using a
regex) breaks it completely, and for encoding issues this can be a
real pain to track down.

I've spent so much time telling people "you can't treat xml as a
string" and then tried to explain some ways to do the update... people
lose interest quickly when faced with SAX (try teaching SAX to someone
to make a small change to a config file!), then get confused later
when I mention Saxon, they really don't want to learn a new language
like XSLT or XQuery, then there's JDOM or XOM or DOM... all options,
all come with yet more libraries to add to the project.

Perhaps I'm missing the golden simple way and a helpful teaching
manner, but I can see the will to live draining from their eyes as I
talk XMLFilterImpl and buffering the Characters...

The 'next xml' needs to be treatable as a string... JSON is just a
string, right?


-- 
Andrew Welch
http://andrewjwelch.com