From: "R. Mark Volkmann" <mark@...>
Date: 2005-01-05T23:53:37+09:00
Subject: evil XML?

I changed the subject because this has really gone off topic.

Quoting "Eustaquio Rangel de Oliveira Jr." <eustaquiorangel@yahoo.com>:

> | Ruby culture says: keep it simple, keep it short, keep away from XML.
>
> This XML stuff is weird. Seems that a lot of people have a bad idea about
> it because of the *huge* XML files a lot of Java stuff needs. I agree that
> there's a lot of mess around there, a lot of no necessary complexity, but
> this kind of generalization is not healthy.
>
> I know YAML is very, very more simple than XML, but XML is helping us to
> make the web more well-designed and with more semantics.
>
> Try to give a look on XML with XSLT, it can make some cool stuff.

XML can be much less verbose if you use attributes instead of child elements
when the data they hold is a simple value as opposed to a paragraph of text.

For example, compare this

<car>
  <make>BMW</make>
  <model>Z3</model>
  <color>yellow</color>
</car>

to this

<car make="BMW" model="Z3" color="yellow"/>

I used to think XSLT was cool until I got tired of how verbose it is and how
often solutions in XSLT require recursion.  I now prefer XQuery over XSLT. 
Currently though there aren't many good XQuery implementations.  One of the
better ones now is Saxon.

--
R. Mark Volkmann
Partner, Object Computing, Inc.