XML

[Stephane Richard]

As they say in the industry.

The Majority (here the most widely used) sometimes means that all the fools
are on the same side...hehehe..

For data Sharing, XML seems to be the way to go, no two ways about it, and
it's why Oracle and SQL Server offer, directly in their SQL statements the
ability to select as XML directly.

To me, although it may be to many tags at times, I use XML for configuration
purposes, instead of an INI file for example. reason being that INI files do
have a size limit and I hate dealign with such limits :-).....also I've
created engines that build dynamic forms from the contents of XML documents
(to define and configure data screens for multiple phase dialogs or
instrumentation in the case of an musical editor librarian).  which can
easily break the 64Kb limit offered by ini files.  and since each tree
section can hold very different GUI design elements for the same part of a
data entry screen.  XML proves ideal in describing each part and under which
condition each part should occur in a very human readable format, at least I
liek to think so :-).



--
Stéphane Richard
Senior Software and Technology Supervisor
http://www.totalweb-inc.com
For all your hosting and related needs
"Ben Finney" <bignose-hates-spam at and-zip-does-too.com.au> wrote in message
news:slrnbfdp5t.qk.bignose-hates-spam at rose.localdomain.fake...
> On 23 Jun 2003 02:42:49 -0700, Paul Boddie wrote:
> > it is fair to say that claiming the suitability of [ASCII plain text]
> > because "there are a lot of parsers which use it" is analogous to
> > telling a Japanese person that they only need to know the Latin
> > alphabet to be able to understand most Western languages.
>
> Good thing nobody's tried to claim that then.  I raised the issue of
> ASCII plain text to refute the claim that HTML was the "most widely used
> document format".  I make no necessarily related claim about
> suitability.
>
> In fact, I raised awareness of the "most widely used document format"
> issue to show that just because something is widely used, doesn't
> necessarily mean it's suitable in all the place it's used.
>
> Plain text ASCII is great as far as it goes, but for structured data,
> a threshold is usually reached where something more complex is needed.
> When it is, XML -- encoded as plain ASCII, or some other standard text
> encoding -- is a prime choice, in my book.
>
> > There are some pretty solid reasons for choosing XML to represent
> > data.
>
> I agree with most of them, and am in favour of choosing XML when
> interchangeable, structured data is needed.
>
> (I'm always tempted to leave out the "interchangeable" -- isn't data
> essentially useless unless it can be interchanged? -- but then I recall
> proprietary formats that enforce vendor lock-in by deliberately
> obstructing interchangeability, and realise it still needs to be made
> explicit.)
>
> --
>  \      "One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing."  |
>   `\                                               -- Henry L. Mencken |
> _o__)                                                                  |
> http://bignose.squidly.org/ 9CFE12B0 791A4267 887F520C B7AC2E51 BD41714B