Re: [Webware-discuss] Whence FormKit? Or, alas, poor FormKit, weknew him.

[<ir...@ms...>]

On Fri, Apr 19, 2002 at 05:58:22PM -0000, pa...@bo... wrote:
> It's certainly hard to define what convenience is where XML processing is 
> concerned. Personally, I'm more and more against converting XML documents to 
> other representations (or accessing them as those representations), 

Funny, I'm becoming more and more convinced not to use XML at all, and
if you have to (e.g., to exchange data with unknown systems, or to let
users edit data in a flat text file), limit the XML to just those
subsystems.  

XML is wonderful in theory, but in practice it takes something that
should be simple and makes it ridiculously complicated.  Why should I
spend hours learning a strange new language (DOM) just to get a few tags
out of my file, or another new language (XSLT) to do template-like
substitutions (I already have Cheetah), or a third new language (xpath)
to avoid DOM?  Or if I use SAX I have to set up callbacks and piece the
portions of the value together.  In the time it takes to learn DOM and
XSLT, I could have my application already done.  

I just wish pyRXP was available a few years ago when the XML tools for
Python first came out.  I bet there's a huge class of Python XML
applications that could get by with pyRXL for input and 'print' or
your template system of choice for output, without ever having to
touch DOM, XSLT or SAX at all.  And that the lack of such a tool has
held back the number of XML-aware Python applications by a significant
amount.  

-- 
-Mike (Iron) Orr, ir...@ms...  (if mail problems: ms...@oz...)
   http://iron.cx/     English * Esperanto * Russkiy * Deutsch * Espan~ol