BitWorking:
Ok, when I ask for Regex-able XML, and complain that the pathologies of XML are the root cause of the problem, I might sound like a simpering newbie who just doesn't know how to use the available tools. So how about listening to a guy who's been doing XML longer than almost anybody: Tim Bray.
So check out Tim Bray's XML Is Too Hard For Programmers.
The most interesting thing I took from Bray's article is this: Years and years after relational database technology is mature, we still spend a lot of our time writing code to shuffle data to and from tables. Similarly, with the callback model of XML processing he's talking about, we spend a lot of time trying to use XML.
Plus, I keep hearing proposals for XML-based programming languages. That's the silliest thing in the world to me, and Bray agrees:
An XML-Oriented Programing Language? One response has been a suggestion that we need a language whose semantics and native data model are optimized for XML. That premise is silly on the face of it: here are two reasons why:
* Some decades after the advent of the relational database, we have not seen programming languages center themselves around normalized data models; in fact, the movement away from the C struct-centered worldview to O-O code+data encapsulation is really a move away from the tabular paradigm. You can embed SQL in most languages now, but normally you don't implement any serious business logic in it. If this hasn't happened after decades in the relational world, why would we expect it to happen in the XML world?
* The notion that there is an "XML data model" is silly and unsupported by real-world evidence. The definition of XML is syntactic: the "Infoset" is an afterthought and in any case is far indeed from being a data model specification that a programmer could work with. Empirical evidence: I can point to a handful of different popular XML-in-Java APIs each of which has its own data model and each of which works. So why would you think that there's a data model there to build a language around?
Update: Here's a response from XML.com
Monday, March 17, 2003
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