[Gllug] belated comment on XML

[Richard Jones]

On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 06:58:03PM +0100, t.clarke wrote:
> Having been forced to extract data from an XML shipping-manifest and
> thus figure out some of XML's complexities, I can't help feeling
> that the language suffers from being designed by committee.  What,
> on the surface seems an elegant concept, has so many extra complex
> rules thrown in, that it makes it on par with EDI to get to grips
> with.  My first reaction was to regard it is as computerised verbal
> diarrhoea - the actual content of a message often being somewhat
> less in size than the tags that surround it.  As for being able to
> simply 'write' XML - what about the special characters that have to
> be replaced by 'entities' ?

It sounds as if you were trying to parse the XML by hand.  There are
libraries for that sort of thing ...

Rich.

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