Re: [dev] Some thoughts about XML

From: Evan Buswell <ebuswell_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 14:44:04 -0700

I loathe XML, but I think the OPs bigger point was: hey look, here is
a way that we can try and create a space between the suck of the web
and our code. So we support browsers through XSLT, and do something
slightly more sane with XML. I think that's a pretty valid suggestion.

IMO, this doesn't go far enough as XML is really not good for
anything. JSON is better for data (or a variant "KSON" I've been
playing with that adds symbolic references and uses binary instead of
utf-8 strings); RST is better for structured text---though I'm not
sure I really like any of the structured text formats.

But OTOH, I do like the idea of separating the translation-to-html bit
from the generate-sensible-output bit. XSLT may have done this poorly,
but it's on the right track (and what else works better for this, Awk?
Perl? m4?). I mean, I take the point that we can't really make the web
stack all that much better, but at least we can containerize suck?
Yes?

On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 11:54 AM, Evan Buswell <ebuswell_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> I loathe XML, but I think the OPs bigger point was: hey look, here is a way
> that we can try and create a space between the suck of the web and our code.
> So we support browsers through XSLT, and do something slightly more sane
> with XML. I think that's a pretty valid suggestion.
>
> IMO, this doesn't go far enough as XML is really not a good for anything.
> JSON is better for data (or a variant "KSON" I've been playing with that
> adds symbolic references and binary instead of utf-8 strings); RST is better
> for structured text---though I'm not sure I really like any of the
> structured text formats.
>
> But OTOH, I do like the idea of separating the translation-to-html bit from
> the rest of it. I mean, I take the point that we can't really make the web
> stack all that much better, but at least we can containerize suck? Yes?
>
> On Oct 19, 2013 9:04 AM, "Dmitrij D. Czarkoff" <czarkoff_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Szymon Olewniczak said:
>> >> s/HTML/XML+XSLT/g is quite a revolution.
>> > But it's something whitch I can use in my application straight away
>> > without forcing user to change their web browsers.
>>
>> You aren't really about replacing HTML with XML+XSLT; you are about
>> *generating* HTML with XML+XSLT, are you?
>>
>> > It's about whole "modern web" stack and ways we can make it better,
>> > without a huge revolution.
>>
>> We can't.
>>
>> 1. We have nothing to do with its development.
>> 2. It only gets worse over time.
>> 3. It is {,mis,ab}used on such scale that it can't be sanitized.
>>
>> You can't have a sane tool for doing everything.
>>
>> --
>> Dmitrij D. Czarkoff
>>
>
Received on Sat Oct 19 2013 - 23:44:04 CEST