----- Original Message ----- From: "Erik Hatcher" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Ant Developers List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, February 16, 2002 3:36 PM Subject: Re: question and idea.
> I actually think you're on to something here. I don't know if there are any > technical constraints that would prevent you from firing SAX events into Ant > or not, but if you can do so then you've decoupled Ant from filesystem > build.xml. I'd suspect that it'd be quite difficult to read a makefile and > fire it into Ant in some reasonable way though. sax events are a reasonable way to represent pre-chewed XML, so could be used as a processing chain to give something a chance to look at the XML before ant starting making tasks out of it. I dont think anyone should roll their own alternative to XML, just to make things 'easier'. XML is an ugly language, Xml schemas just 'kin bizarre in places where the document faction gained control over the OO faction. And namespaces, wonderful as they are, are wierd too and some people (hint: MS) impose their own interpretation on default namespaces which may make sense but are incompatible with anyone else. And what niggles me the most, you cant include binary content, even CDATA has its limits. If it'd had the ability to declare a run length of 'dont parse' binary data then many things would be much easier. But its a standard. It has interop with other systems, and other tools. You can edit build files in any XML editor, you can save the files in SCM, and once you know how to read and write XML, you can read and write anyone elses (exception, complex machine generated tat like Word in XML, Soap1.1 messages, etc). The parsers are all written, which makes life a lot simpler. Also, it is quite clearly a tree structure ideal for config files; there is even a jakarta commons project to make reading such config files a reusable component in your code. With a unified format for these files it is easier to autogenerate the files from other build processes, which is the kind of thing we like. If people want to roll something different, look at RDF and consider how you could do a build system in that declarative-clause-syntax-atop-xml kind of langage. -Steve (disclaimer, friends have been on the XSD /RDF working groups, acquaintance on the W3C technical committee, clearly I am biased :) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
