From: Dave Thomas <Dave@...>
Date: 2001-02-26T15:23:48+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:11571] Re: trial balloon: Ruby desktop?

"John van V." <john_van_v@yahoo.com> writes:

> All this data interchange stuff is nice but the only really useful
> application of XML is to the browser itself.  Forget DTDs, all you
> need is a CSS file to give the rendering instructions to your
> specific markup tags.  As much sense as this makes, damn little CSS
> is actually appears in browsers and none of it accomodates XML
> markup (so far).

Having just spent three weeks translating XML back and forth for the
book project, I'd afraid I'd have to disagree with this.

XML _is_ verbose and clumsy, but it can also be expressive. Combine
that with XPATH/XSLT and you can do some really useful data
transformation work remarkably easily. A data source can be completely 
restructured or inverted, for example, but writing some fairly
straightforward XSLT constructs. 

I've never sent XML to a browser to be displayed, but I _do_ use XML
to maintain a single set of pages that is shared in quite different
formats between two web sites.

The main problem with XML is that handling it from within code is
cumbersome. I noticed on one of the Japanese language mailing lists
that someone has produced an xml2rb program. I don't suppose that maps 
a DOM to a set of Ruby objects? That would be seriously useful.


Dave