Re: ANNOUNCE: XML Tools 2.3.2
Re: ANNOUNCE: XML Tools 2.3.2
- Subject: Re: ANNOUNCE: XML Tools 2.3.2
- From: Helmut Fuchs <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 19:30:04 +0100
At 11:56 Uhr -0500 21.11.2001, Arthur J Knapp wrote:
It is a document's adherence to the standard itself that defines
interoperability, not the degree of "looseness" that a given parser
allows.
True. But in the long run it is to be feared that XML degenerates
into the same problems HTML has.
A few years back I wrote a nice little Web-Browser for the late
little Newton. It was quite simple to put a parser together that was
able to understand CORRECT HTML. But then - there's nearly no correct
HTML around, because every other Browser is so "tolerant". So I had
to spend a huge amount of time and energy to figure out what the most
common mistakes are and how to display those pages... and in the end
my software was about three times as large as before and much less
stable.
Today it seems like history is going to repeat itself. My clients
supply me with XML that's been generated from "XML savvy" tools.
Mostly it's ill formed and resembles XML only in that it contains a
lot of angled brackets... (and most of the times is not even encoded
properly). I made it a habit to try to bring my clients to correct
their XML output - which most of them do, and most are quite thankful
for being helped.
[As a side note: I don't get much bad XML from Macish or Unixish
clients - may be the word "standard" has another meaning in the
M$-world...]
And while I'm at it - my little Browser put its parsed HTML into a
similar data structure as XML Tools does with XML. To process the
HTML I made heavy use of NewtonScript's ability to iterate over
records. This isn't possible with AppleScript (yet?). But it would
be, if XML Tools' output was according to JWBaumann's suggestions.
Conclusion:
1. Non standard behaviour should not be standard behaviour of XML Tools.
2. If XML Tools could output attributes as paired lists, this would certainly
be helpful for some uses.
But such wishes aside: thanks a lot to Mark for making XML Tools the
great tool that they already are!!
-Helmut