XML overuse? (was Re: Python to XML to Python conversion)

[Bancroft Scott]

Jonathan Hogg <jonathan at onegoodidea.com> wrote in message news:<B956F27C.DFC8%jonathan at onegoodidea.com>...
> And to answer François' earlier point about not being able to use
> "standardised" meaningfully with regard to XML. I consider XML to be
> "standardised" not because the W3C said so, but because parsing, validating,
> querying, and transforming frameworks are available for nearly any language
> off-the-shelf, editors support it, and database and data manipulation tools
> support it.
> 
> I'm afraid Pickle doesn't come close in this regard (and isn't human
> readable anyway). CSV is probably closer but it doesn't support complex
> enough structure for me. ASN.1 might be a contender but also isn't human
> readable and doesn't have the same availability of tools. And certainly, any
> random syntax I might come up with will have support no further than I
> write.

ASN.1 now defines the XML Encoding Rules.  You will find that ASN.1
tools such as those from OSS Nokalva, uniGone, Objective Systems, 
ATOS, among others, now generate not only the very compact binary 
encodings that are typically associated with ASN.1, but human-readable 
XML encodings as well.  Some of these tools even generate default 
stylesheets and DTD's from the ASN.1 input that make it easy to work 
with other XML tools.  By using ASN.1 as the schema language, it 
becomes easy to generate very compact encodings (e.g., ASN.1 PER-encoded
messages) for transmission, then upon receipt easily convert the message
from binary to XML for use with common XML tools such as browsers.  As 
far as tool availabilty goes, see 
http://asn1.elibel.tm.fr/en/links/index.htm#tools.

Bancroft