lxml/ElementTree and .tail

[Uche Ogbuji]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> Uche Ogbuji wrote:
>
> > I certainly have never liked the aspects of the ElementTree API under
> > present discussion.  But that's not as important as the fact that I
> > think the above statement is misleading.  There has always been a
> > battle in XML between the people who think the serialization is
> > preeminent, and those who believe some data model is preeminent, but
> > the reality is that XML 1.0 (an 1.1) is a spec *defined* by its
> > serialization.
>
> sure, the computing world is and has always been full of people who want
> the simplest thing to look a lot harder than it actually is.  after all,
> *they* spent lots of time reading all the specifications, they've bought
> all the books, and went to all the seminars, so it's simply not fair
> when others are cheating.

You sound bitter about something.  Don't worry, it's really not all
that serious.

> in reality, *all* interchange formats are easier to understand and use
> if you focus on a (complete or intentionally simplified) data model of
> the things being interchanged, and treat various artifacts of the
> byte-stream used by the wire format as artifacts, historical accidents
> based on what specification happened to be written before the other, or
> what some guy did or did not do in the seventies, as accidents, and
> esoteric arcana disseminated on limited-distribution mailing lists as
> about as relevant for your customer as last week's episode of American Idol.

The fact that the XML Infoset is hardly used outside W3C XML Schema,
and that the XPath data model is far more common, and that focus on the
serialization is even more common than that is a matter of everyday
practicality.

And oh by the way, this thread is all about *your* customer's
complaining.  And your response is to give them your philosophical take
on XML.  Doesn't that contradict what you're saying above?

Oh never mind.  You posted something misleading, and I posted another
point of view.  I know you're incapable of any disagreement that
doesn't devolve into a full-scale flame-war.  Sometimes I have time for
that sort of thing.  This is not one fo those times, so this is
probably where I get off.

--
Uche Ogbuji                               Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net                    http://fourthought.com
http://copia.ogbuji.net                   http://4Suite.org
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