Re: [xml-dev] Parsing XML with anything but

[Michael Sokolov <msokolov@safaribooksonline.com>]

Well that comes back to what I always come back to on this list. XML is to complicated, and that complication necessarily manifests itself in fully compliant tools.  Developers have come to hate XML and just want to crowbar, chisel and scrape it as quickly as possible into a structure that they can actually understand, using a tool that seems to hate XML as much as they do.

I wanted to know whether there was anything more to it than this. The same set of people that will decry parentheses in Scheme or angled bracketed markup will happily type in hieroglyphics at a mongodb shell prompt without a murmur of protest. So it's not based on rationality then.

No there is more to it than mere angle brackets.  I plowed into this in 1998 with a perl regexp based parser and it took me years to find out I had ignored things people expected to work in XML. Entity replacement via DTD is probably the most obvious (and other arcane DTD transformations like applying namespaces), but also whitespace normalization in attributes, line ending normalization, etc, and there are probably other things I forgot or never learned about, not being a parser writer, really, but which eventually will trip you up if you go about it on your own.

-Mike