On Fri, Jun 10, 2005 at 09:30:47AM +1000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > If I change the character this once then that's fixes the problem once, > since it is a news feed I'll just have to face the problem again which > means what I really have to do is write a program to fix the data. > In effect, I'm writing a pre-processor for the XML parser which makes > me think, "how good is XML when I have to write a pre-processor for it".
To be fair, you're not writing a preprocessor for the XML, you're writing a pre-processor to turn the "I Can't Believe It's Not XML!" you're getting and turning it into actual XML. The problem with XML isn't that it's a crap language, it's that people are very poor at following instructions. When a spec says "thou MUST do it this way", instead of doing it this way, people think "that's not important" and don't do it. I'm not sure whether the problem is basic human nature, or because we've been conditioned by so many really bong specs to ignore anything that doesn't make immediate sense to us... As for the comparison with HTML, web browsers have been written to accept random garbage and try and make something useful out of it because that's what the web consists of. While it would be theoretically possible to do a similar thing with XML, it's a lot harder because you can "guess" what to do with bad HTML because of the limited use-case of HTML -- describing a web page. For XML it's a lot harder, because you can't make any assumptions about what the meaning of the data is that you're parsing. - Matt
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