From: Sean Russell <ser@...>
Date: 2002-06-02T03:28:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby, XML schema( RELAX NG) and a Q&D parser

bbense+comp.lang.ruby.Jun.01.02@telemark.stanford.edu wrote:
> - - I think for a first pass, I'm just going to try to get the
> C struct headers written from the RELAX NG schema descriptions.
> It's looking like full RELAX ng is too complicated for what I
> want to do. I think XML would be much more useful if the design
> committees had to play Russian Roulette with an extra bullet
> for every new feature. Deleting an existing feature would
> allow you to take bullets out the gun %-).

Well, remember where XML came from: SGML.  If you think XML is hairy, take a 
look at history.  I think they did OK with XML, although namespaces suck.  
XMLSchema has gone the way of SGML: it is /vastly/ better than DTD, but 
they could have done 80% of what they wanted to with 20% of the cruft.

If you want an absurdly simple metadata format, take a look at Pyx.  It 
isn't a standard, and documentation about it is really scarce, but it 
doesn't need much documentation because it is a trivial format (about as 
trivial as you can get and still have document structure).  I've done a Pyx 
parser in Ruby and Java, and some XML<->Pyx converters (which I haven't 
released yet); that, and some information on Pyx is at:

        http://www.germane-software.com/software/Pyx

You don't really need a parser for Pyx, though.  You can grep it.

-- 
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